The introduction of radio astronomy could have left the Newtonian conception of the universe intact. But seeing beyond the optical did mean seeing more phenomena and having to accommodate new kinds of information. This new universe would still run like clockwork; the laws that had arisen through Galileo’s observations and Newton’s computations would still presumably apply. But now, so would Hubble’s and Einstein’s, and in their universe the motions of the heavens weren’t cyclical so much as linear; their cosmos corresponded not so much to a pocket watch, its hands and gears grinding and
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