Friday, August 06, 2010

The Stage is too Big

This mosaic image of the Crab Nebula was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space, and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

~ Richard Feynman, speaking in 1959, quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)