“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.
From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses, and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, and others, turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out - and this took a long, long, long time to sink in - that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of the millions or billions that make up the universe, and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the universe was ours...
The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the FIRST AGE OF SAND.”
—Douglas Adams
Job
Airline Pilot
