"The Invention of Science" ~ David Wootton
So even before the microscope had been put to serious use, the telescope created vertiginous sense of the infinite vastness of the universe and the insignificance of human beings when viewed, in the mind’s eye, from outer space. In the Lucretian universe the gods are indifferent to human beings, and human beings are an accidental consequence of the random jostling together of atoms. The Scaling Revolution had the effect of forcing even those who continued to believe in the divine architect to recgonize the coherence of this view. Even Kepler and Pascal, who wanted to think of themselves as inhabiting universe made by God for man’s salvation, found that they had no choice but to recognize that the universe was so vast, and the tiniest creatures within it were so exquisitely detailed, that it was either infinite, or might as well be. ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frighten me,’ wrote Pascal. Like it or not even those who insisted tht Bruno was wrong when he described an infinite universe were forced to imagine what it would be like it he were right. ~ Page 243
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