The sophisticated playfulness of The Sand Reckoner is perhaps not only about an audacious mathematical construction, or the virtuosity of one of the most extraordinary minds of antiquity. It is also a defiant cry of reason, which recognizes its own ignorance but refuses to delegate to others the source of knowledge. It is a small, reserved and powerfully intelligent manifesto against infinity – against obscurantism. Quantum gravity is one of the many lines that continue the quest of The Sand Reckoner. We are counting the grains of space of which the cosmos is made. A vast cosmos, but a finite
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