9. The intuition that something profound is happening in a great work of art is, in scientific terms, meaningless.

Millions of people have experienced, in the presence of some ancient work of art, the conviction that something of massive importance is going on there. Yet our prevailing cosmology provides no way in which this conviction may be understood coherently together with the rest of our scientific knowledge. By default, our cosmology relegates art to the status of an interesting psychological phenomenon. Certainly it does not allow art equal status with the awe-inspiring realities of the atom, or of the galactic universe.

This is not to say that scientists, like others, do not have instincts which make them feel the deep importance that a work of art can have. But, scientifically speaking, that is only a vague instinct at best. So far, it has no place in the body of thoughts and concepts which make up our fundamental picture of the world.

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