is purely scientific- liberate yourself "from the obsession with certainty and hope" since these close you "to new experiences about reality." Pagels realized that most theoretical physics has become a belief factory and that nothing we hold as truth today will suffice for tomorow's world. He urges his reader to develop tolerance for complexity and to welcome contradiction in order to escape the fallacies inherent in simplicity and certainty. He urges his reader to live as he died-an explorer of the unknown. I've reread this book several times over the years, and I find it a pleasure each time. I decided to write a review today after starting yet another rereading. An observation that made me want to write a little bit of a review was some of the historical tidbits in the book. He mentions Alvin Clarke discovering a white dwarf star around the star system Serius(sorry if I got the spelling a bit off on the star system serius). Alvin Clark as noted by Heinz Pagels made the optics for the last refracting telescopes before the giant reflectors pretty much put the refractors in their places historically. Because I had read 'The Glass Giant of Palomar' I almost knew the name intimatelly. This is why books like the Perfect Symmetry' and 'the Glass Giant' have their place in the intellectual life. It's like hearing the words of Thales himself or whoever made the number patterns on the those bones tens of thousands of years ago. I then started