Sublime

The first bottom-up attempt to untangle the riddle of design was to search for a profound mathematical truth at the kernel of existence. The second line of attack, multiverse cosmology, also relied on timeless metalaws, but augmented with the anthropic selection of a habitable island universe.

“Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation.

corresponds to

A ciência depende de um ceticismo organizado, isto é, de uma dúvida contínua e metódica. Poucos de nós duvidamos de nossas próprias conclusões, assim a ciência adota sua abordagem cética recompensando aqueles que duvidam das conclusões de outros.

science is not a collection of truths, but ‘a continuing exploration of mysteries’.

This paradox of comprehension was articulated explicitly by a great physicist of an earlier age: “Sir Isaac Newton, when asked what he thought of the infatuations of the people, answered that he could calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude” (quoted from The Church of England Quarterly Review, 1850).

one of the best descriptions of science I’ve ever read: ‘Science is guided by natural law. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law. It is testable against the empirical world. Its conclusions are tentative (not necessarily the final word). It is falsifiable.’

These are constants like “the mass of an electron” and “the strength of gravity,” all of which have been precisely measured and never change. These twenty numbers appear inconceivably fine-tuned—in fact, if these numbers didn’t have the exact value that they do, nothing in the universe would exist. They are so perfect that it almost appears as if s