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This story is part of our Cosmic Perspective special, in which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Read the rest of the series here.
Perfect it may not be, but science is our best route to objective knowledge. Through observation, experiment and mathematical abstraction, it strives for a third-person perspective, a view from the outside of whatever we investigate. That is perhaps most obvious in physics, which seeks to describe things at every scale. “We take ourselves out of the system to stabilise [it] as an object that we can think about,”…
