Wasn’t the kind of education Charlie and I had received simply a set of words and references that connected you to a group of people like yourself? In physics we say that we do science for science’s sake, and that there is value in that. Our knowledge of our universe itself, from its explosive early inflation to its current growth rate, has become exponentially more precise in my lifetime. We could all give a quote to a journalist, or end an undergraduate lecture with a few sentences about scientific thinking as a key component of our humanity, and I think most of us really believe those
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