Our best science tells us wonderful things. The cold and dark skies of our universe were not so long ago in their entirety in a state of unimaginably high energy and temperature. The detritus that exploded from it congealed into stars, planets, and galaxies. These systems of celestial masses are in turn held together by a curvature of the geometry of space and time itself. On a most minute scale, the matter of these systems and the light they radiate consist of neither waves nor particles but a curious amalgam that is, at once, both and neither. The organisms that walk on one of these planets, complete with their intricate eyes and thinking brains, emerged incrementally from crude matter, in tiny steps over eons. They were shaped only by the fact that a small, random change in one organism might give it a slight advantage over its rivals. The design specification of these accumulated advantages is recorded and transmitted through the generations of the organisms by its encoding in hundreds of millions of base pairs of a chemical found in every cell of each organism. These, and many more ideas of science like them, are extraordinary. Their contemplation must eventually overwhelm with wonder even the most curious and flexible of minds. Only the dullest of wit or the most soured of skeptics could resist their charms. For me, there is a still greater wonder. These ideas are not the inventions of writers of myth and fiction. They could not be so, for their content far outstrips our meager human imaginations. Rather they are the result of careful, painstaking, systematic investigations of nature, guided solely
by inventive insight and cautious reasoning. They are discoveries. When these efforts go past the early speculative stages and succeed, their products are distinguished by a special relation with what we experience of the world. These experiences provide the inductive support for successful science. They tell us that this is how the world is.