The mountain can be metaphorical. It doesn’t have to be impossibly distant or impossibly tall. You don’t have to be Newton and re-derive calculus from scratch to learn to appreciate what he actually did, what it means, and why it matters. You still have to look at the water. This, it turns out, is a difficult skill to convey. So is stepping away from the equations and learning to feel the forces in your bones. But without that, it’s questionable whether the thing being learned is “science” in the sense of ability-to-understand-reality.
The mountain can be metaphorical. It doesn’t have to be impossibly distant or impossibly tall. You don’t have to be Newton and re-derive calculus from scratch to learn to appreciate what he actually did, what it means, and why it matters. You still have to look at the water. This, it turns out, is a difficult skill to convey. So is stepping away from the equations and learning to feel the forces in your bones. But without that, it’s questionable whether the thing being learned is “science” in the sense of ability-to-understand-reality.