“The narrow, local kind of mythic explanation that sufficed when cultures rarely mixed will never work in the emerging global culture. We now need myths that are not only scientifically believable but allow us to participate – all of us. To experience the human meaning of modern scientific cosmology, and to turn it into a working cosmology – a meaningful universe – in which we feel like participants, our culture will gradually have to transform it into myth. However, mythmaking is no longer a purely imaginative, spiritual endeavor. Today, the leeway for speculation about the nature of time, space, and matter has narrowed. Now that we have data, whole classes of possibilities have been ruled out, and science is closing in on the class of myths that could actually be true” (Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe (New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2006) p.36).
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In