Writing about history as well as science, Mikhail Epstein underscores Stengers’s link between the interesting and evidence in his account of the former as the “relationship of provability to probability.” Epstein writes, “What makes a certain theory interesting is its presentation of a consistent and plausible proof for what appears to be least probable. In other words, the interest of a theory is inversely proportional to the probability of its thesis and directly proportional to the provability of its argument” (78).

Epstein continues,

If wonder involves the measure of improbability, then reason provides the measure of provability. We now see that the category of the interesting emerges as the measure of tension between wonder and understanding or, in other words, between the alterity of the object and reason’s capacity to integrate it. On the one hand, an object offering a proliferation of wonders without any reasonable explanation diminishes its potential to be interesting because we give up all hope of rationally integrating such a phenomenon. On the other hand, the evacuation of wonder that guarantees an easy triumph for reason undermines our interest as well. (79)