When we think about breakthrough ideas, we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original invention. We figure out a way to make artificial cold, and we assume that will just mean that our rooms will be cooler, we’ll sleep better on hot nights, or there will be a reliable supply of ice cubes for our sodas. That much is easy to understand. But if you tell the story of cold only in that way, you miss the epic scope of it.
