“We often do not see what we do not expect to see”

— Alan Lightman

Great Ideas in Physics : The Conservation of Energy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics (2000), p. 4
Context: The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A. D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

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Alan Lightman 18

Physicist, science writer, essayist, novelist 1948

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