time passing by

Our ancestors were eager to understand the world but had not quite stumbled uponthe method. They imagined a small, quaint, tidy universe in which the dominant forceswere gods like Anu, Ea, and Shamash. In that universe humans played an important if not acentral role. We were intimately bound up with the rest of nature. The treatment oftoothache with second-rate beer was tied to the deepest cosmological mysteries.Today we have discovered a powerful and elegant way to understand the universe, amethod called science; it has revealed to us a universe so ancient and so vast that humanaffairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence. We have grown distant from theCosmos.