he saw a danger in tying moral guidance to unpalatable myths, as religion did, and he resented the common view that science, with its merciless unraveling and explaining, was an enemy of the emotional appreciation of beauty. “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms,” he wrote in a famous footnote. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part.... What
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