Free Knocking on Heaven's Door by Lisa Randall

shorter distances than have ever been observed.
    As we enter new regimes of precision in measurement and theory, Galileo’s understanding of how to design and interpret experiments continues to reverberate. His legacy lives on as we use devices to create images far from visible to the naked eye and apply his insights into how the scientific method works, using experiments to confirm or refute scientific ideas. The conference participants in Padua were thinking about what might be found soon and what it could mean, in the hope we will soon once again cross new thresholds of knowledge. In the interim, we’ll keep knocking.

CHAPTER THREE
    LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD
    In February 2008, the poet Katherine Coles and the biologist and mathematician Fred Adler, both from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, organized an interdisciplinary conference entitled “A Universe in a Grain of Sand.” The meeting’s topic was the role of scale in various disciplines—a theme that could capitalize on the wide-ranging interests of the diverse group of speakers and attendees. Dividing up our observations into different-sized categories so that we can make sense of and organize them and piece them back together was a subject to which our panel—consisting of a physicist, an architectural critic, and an English professor—could all contribute in interesting ways.
    In her opening talk, the literary critic and poet Linda Gregerson described the universe as “sublime.” The word precisely captures what makes the universe so wonderful and so frustrating at the same time. A great deal seems beyond our reach and our comprehension, while still appearing to be close enough to tantalize us—to dare us to enter and understand. The challenge for all approaches to knowledge is to make those less accessible aspects of the universe more immediate, more understandable, and ultimately less foreign. People want to learn to read and understand the book of nature and accommodate those lessons into the comprehensible world.

    Humanity employs different methods and strives toward contrasting goals in the attempt to unravel the mysteries of life and the world. Art, science, and religion—though they might involve common creative impulses—offer distinct means and methods of approach toward bridging the gaps in our understanding.
    So before returning to the world of modern physics, the remainder of this part of the book contrasts these various ways of thinking, introduces some historical context for the science-religion debate, and presents at least one aspect of that debate that won’t ever be resolved. In examining these issues, we’ll explore science’s materialist and mechanistic premises—an essential feature of a scientific approach to knowledge. In all likelihood, those who are at extreme ends of the spectrum won’t change their minds, but this discussion might nonetheless help in more precisely identifying the roots of the differences.
    THE SCALE OF THE UNKNOWN
    The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke rather dramatically captured the paradox at the heart of our feelings when faced with the sublime when he wrote: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” 10 In her Salt Lake City talk, Linda Gregerson addressed the sublime in subtle, illuminating, and somewhat less intimidating words. She elaborated on Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the beautiful, which “would have us believe we are made for this universe and it for us” and the sublime, which is far more scary. Gregerson described how people feel “apprehension in beholding the sublime” because it seems to be “a poorer fit”—less suited to human interactions and perceptions.
    The word “sublime” reemerged in 2009 in discussions of music, art, and science with my collaborators on a physics-based opera about these themes. For our conductor, Clement Power,