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cheap, running a couple of hundred dollars or so. Yet this is a modest price to pay for revelation, revolution, and—let's push this envelope out of the box while we're at it—personal salvation. Like Professor Brown, I speak from experience. I was accustomed to looking through high-powered microscopes in laboratories and seeing immune cells and cancer cells and frogs' eggs and kidney tissue from fetal mice. But it wasn't until my daughter received a dissecting microscope as a gift, and we began using it to examine the decidua of everyday life, that I began yodeling my hallelujahs. A feather from a blue jay, a fiddlehead fern, a scraping from a branch that turned out to be the tightly honeycombed housing for a stinkbug's eggs. How much heft and depth, shadow and thistle, leap out at you when the small is given scope to strut. At a mere 40 × magnification, salt grains look like scattered glass pillows, a baby beetle becomes a Fabergé egg, and, as much as I hate mosquitoes, a mosquito under the microscope is pure Giacometti:
Thin Man Takes Wing, with Violin.
    Yes, the world is out there, over your head and under your nose, and it is real and it is knowable. To understand something about why a thing is as it is in no way detracts from its beauty and grandeur, nor does it reduce the observed to "just a bunch of"—chemicals, molecules, equations, specimens for a microscope. Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminishes the mystery or art or "holiness" of life. Let's say you look at a red rose, said Brian Greene, and you understand a bit about the physics behind its lovely blood blush. You know that red is a certain wavelength of light, and that light is made of little particles called photons. You understand that photons representing all colors of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular
composition of pigments in the rose, it's the red photons that bounce off its petals and up to your eyes, and so you see red.
    "I like that picture," said Greene. "I like the extra story line, which comes, by the way, from Richard Feynman. But I still have the same strong emotional response to a rose as anybody else. It's not as though you become an automaton, dissecting things to death." To the contrary. A rose is a rose is a rose; but the examined rose is a sonnet.
    That the universe can be explored and incrementally understood without losing its "magic" does not imply a corollary: that maybe "magic" is true after all, is hidden under accretions of apparent order, and that one of these days reality will kick off on a bucking broomstick toward Hogwarts on the hill. The universe still brims with mysteries, of course, but, in their conviction that the universe is knowable, scientists doubt that these question marks, once they have been understood well enough to become commas, will prove to be regions of arbitrary lawlessness or paranormality. "We have a pretty good idea of what kind of world this is, and it is not as mysterious, in the conventional sense of the word, as some people might wish," said Steven Weinberg. "It's not a world in which human destiny is linked to the positions of planets, or where people can be cured by crystals or bend spoons with their thoughts. Sometimes the police will call in a psychic to help solve a crime, and you'll hear a discussion on television for or against. But this isn't really an open question."
    For example, one of the great conundrums in astronomy is the nature of something called dark energy, a kind of antigravitational force that appears to be pushing the accelerator pedal of the universe. The universe, as we'll discuss later, was born in the celebrated Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since; that much is clear and nearly incontrovertible. Yet until quite recently scientists thought that the rate of expansion was slowing down. You know how it is: a