Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see lesss or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one million year old light...What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were like a man, but if he is and immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- R.P. Feynman
