From Mshiltonj wiki

Here’s a quote I like. More of a story, really. It’s a little long, but offers, I think, a good perspective. It originally appeared in an article in Business 2.0, back in 1999. It’s not available online unless you are subscriber.

In the 19th century, physics made the world more comprehensible. It was assumed that the real world operated like a vast clock. If we were to identify all its pieces and figure out how they work, we would understand the nature of things. It was not hard to visualize the causal cascade of events that would explain why things are as they are.

Then along came relativity and quantum theory. Suddenly space and time became malleable and fluid. Heisenberg showed us that thanks to the dynamics of very small things, it was impossible to know just where a thing was or how fast it was moving in what direction and so on. Uncertainty is in the nature of things. We now have great difficulty imagining the workings of physical reality. After all, can anyone really imagine the Big Bang… a unique discontinuity in the fabric of space-time that suddenly exploded in a flash of enormous energy to create the universe?

We’ve been here before. In the West, one of the earliest models of the universe was erected by Ptolemy. It worked fairly well, except for the fact that it assumed that our planet was the center of the universe and that everything rotated around the Earth. As astronomy got more sophisticated, we had to invent ever more elaborate mathematical models to make Ptolemy’s picture of reality work. The astral cycles of heavenly movement became cycles within cycles within cycles. Until finally Copernicus suggested we imagine the Sun was the center of the system. The way we conceived the workings of the universe literally shifted and it was simple again both in perception and in mathematics.

The present moment in physics has the whiff of Ptolemaic epicycles about it. Perhaps the universe is actually incredibly complex and incomprehensible. Or, just maybe, it is our models that have become complex and incomprehensible. Perhaps new theories will yield ways of seeing things that are not as simple minded as the clockwork universe of the 19th century or as illusive as the unimaginable world of the 20th century. In our new understanding of the relationships of the very large to the very small, we may literally revisualize the universe around us.

Revisualize the universe around us. That’s pretty profound.