It is … paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things.
—Karl Marx, Das Kapital, quoted by Francis Wheen in The Guardian.
Or that objects in motion tend to stay in motion: It took an extraordinary leap of imagination, to traverse the nearly two millennia from Aristotle, who thought otherwise, to Newton, who realized this, despite no one ever having, say, thrown a ball that didn’t stop moving (it took another couple of centuries before we could do that — launch a satellite into orbit, that is).
Once you accept these supposed paradoxes, does that help you understand that the universe might have had a beginning, and no end, starting from hot and dense 15 billion years ago? Or that proto-apes may have begat proto-humans?
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