Gary Wayne I tend to see things as analogies; mathematics and
   language,ideas, art and music as symbolic and, ultimately
   swappable models of reality. Sometimes the "tool becomes the
   thing"; mathematics as a tool to describe reality becomes the
   reality; in religions, the stories to describe reality become
   the reality... in physics, the use of statistics to help
   approximate the subatomic world ofte...n becomes the subatomic
   world; not necessarily in reality, but in the minds of those who
   work with the tools for so long, it becomes the entirety of
   reality for them."