The black hole solution of Einstein's equations is also a work of art. The black hole is not as majestic as Godel's proof, but it has the essential f… - Freeman Dyson

Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too.

In contrast to Kuhn, Galison in his classic work Image and Logic, published in 1997, describes the history of particle physics as a history of tools rather than ideas. According to Image and Logic, the progress of science is tool-driven. The tools of particle physics are of two kinds, optical and electronic. The optical tools are devices such as cloud chambers, bubble chambers, and photographic emulsions, which display particle interactions visually by means of images. The images record the tracks of particles. An experienced experimenter can see at once from the image when a particle is doing something unexpected. Optical tools are more likely to lead to discoveries that are qualitatively new.

On the other hand, electronic tools are better for answering quantitative questions. Electronic detectors such as the Geiger counters that measure radioactivity in the cellars of old houses are based on logic. They are programmed to ask simple questions each time they detect a particle, and to record whether the answers to the questions are yes or no. They can detect particle collisions as at rates of millions per second, sort them into yes's and no's, and count the number that answered yes and the number that answered no. The history of particle physics may be divided into two periods, the earlier period ending about 1980 when optical detectors and images were dominant, and the later period when electronic detectors and logic were dominant. Before the transition, science advanced by making qualitative discoveries of new particles and new relationships between particles. After the transition, with the zoo of known particles more or less complete, the science advanced by measuring their interactions with greater and greater precision. In both periods, before and after the transition, tools were the driving force of progress.

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence