An Understood World

Reading an article by astrophysicist Adam Frank at NPR's 13.7 blog ("Can Science Save The World?"), I found myself resonating with his story of hope in science:

More than anything before it in human history, science was an approach to the world's uncertainty that demanded results. Answers needed to be worked out in public and they needed to be demonstrably true over and over again.

In that new approach came a new kind of success. Ancient horrors like disease and hunger were, for the first ti...