What a piece of work is man, I often wonder with the bard. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, how like an angel, like a god. So join me for a moment in celebrating us — homo sapiens, "wise man,” humanity. For we are an incredible species.
What other beings could — as we just did — position a telescope between the Earth and the sun? Like a new god wafting between Gaia and Helios, it has an eye so powerful that it can peer backwards in time to see light emitted during the Big Bang. With it, humans are one step closer to literally observing creation.
Extend that sense of awe for just another moment. In a Large Hadron Collider underneath the Franco-Swiss border, other angels of science are smashing unimaginably tiny particles into one another. They’re closing in on the Higgs boson — also called the "God particle.” It’s some sort of vibration which gives mass to other elementary particles, like quarks and electrons — thereby making possible, well, everything.