You've tapped yourself in some sort of fifth­century religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where'… - Carl Sagan

Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.

If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed there wouldn't be much to do. There'd be nothing to figure out. There'd be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world where things changed in random or complex ways we wouldn't be able to figure things out. And again, there'd be no such thing as science. But we live in an in-between universe where things change, all right but according to patterns, rules or as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so, it's possible to figure things out. We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives.