After Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his homemade telescope in 1610, religious critics decried his new sun-centered theory as a dethronement of man. They didn’t suspect that this was only the first dethronement of several. One hundred years later, the study of sedimentary layers by the Scottish farmer James Hutton toppled the Church’s estimate of the age of the Earth—making it eight hundred thousand times older. Not long afterward, Charles Darwin relegated humans to just another branch in the swarming animal kingdom. At the beginning of the 1900s, quantum mechanics irreparably
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