Top Highlights

• Less certain but supported by compelling calculations are the infinities, the infinity of the small and the infinity of the large. The unending world of ever smaller things within the atom, and the unending world of ever larger things, beyond our telescopes. Between these two endpoints of the imagination are we human beings, fragile and brief, clut...
• Between Nothingness and Infinity In a lifetime, most people travel no farther than five hundred miles from home. During that limited exploration of the physical world, we record memories of nearby objects and experiences—people, houses, trees, local lakes and rivers, sounds of birds, clouds—all funneled into our brains by our eyes and ears.
• The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature…We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison to the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere…What is man in the infinite?
• I will let him see therein a new abyss…For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe…is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained ...
• At the time that Pascal wrote this remarkable passage, the first crude microscopes had only recently been invented, and the greatest distance measured was that to the Sun. In particular, the size of the crystalline “heavenly sphere,” on which hung the stars, was completely unknown. Working in a cold and dimly lit house on the outskirts of Paris, at...