In the past, new physics has opened up new horizons for human imagination, new ways of thinking about our own existence, new ideas in fields as wildly disparate as biology and art, geology and religion. If Copernicus hadn’t unseated the Earth from its place at the center of the cosmos, it’s hard to imagine that Darwin could have had the audacity to suggest that humans were not wholly unique creations but instead descended from apes—and without both of those insights, Kubrick certainly couldn’t have filmed 2001. Science and culture form an undivided whole, now more than ever, in our world whose
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