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Fundamental requirement to seek an abstract knowledge of how and why we are here is a basic factor to distinguish between human beings and other animals. Even dolphins and their theories of human intelligence may become equivalent (some people will say that they are potential advantages) to a considerable brain power to control their immediate environment, the oceans, so that they adapt to the supremacy, but they do not seem to have plagued the urgent demand to know how to adapt to the environment of the total environment of the universe - impulse has been the driving force behind many of the most significant intellectual achievements of mankind.           New Perspectives     Insights which have led to the greatest advances in the development of our world view have come from those thinkers able to make the great leap of asking how things would be if they were not as they seem to our senses, which have been conditioned by everyday life? …This method of progress has continued from the time that man first puzzled about the Universe in the dim reaches of prehistory, through the earliest documentation that has come down to us, until now. The fundamental urge to seek abstract knowledge about how and why we are here is a basic factor distinguishing human beings from other animals. Even dolphins with their theoretical potential to be humans’ intellectual equals (some would say they are potentially superior) devote their considerable brain power to the control of their immediate environment, the sea, to which they are superbly adapted, and they seem not to have been beset by the urge to know how their local environment fits into the greater environment of the total Universe — the urge that has been the driving force behind many of the most significant intellectual achievements of the human race. This fundamental human urge remains, whatever it is called, whether religion, philosophy, astrology, astronomy, or cosmology.   Under its variety of semantic guises over the centuries, this desire to know has brought such progress that today we have a knowledge of the Universe that encompasses a range hardly dreamed of by our ancestors. This is not to say that there is an end to the search — we still have no evidence of any single answer to the question posed by our existence. Indeed, the more we know, the more it becomes clear how much remains to be understood. The growth of knowledge might be likened to an expanding balloon, with the volume of air inside the balloon representing the known and the skin of the balloon marking the boundary between the known and the unknown. As the volume of the known increases, so does the surface area of the balloon — the extent of the boundary between the known and the unknown — so that the more we see, the more we see there is to see. Life is more complicated for us than it was for the ancients who were able to accept most events in their lives as the will of a god or the gods. Our increased understanding of the Universe has not been a smooth, steady progression over the centuries. Throughout history, new insights into the nature of the Universe and man’s place in it have appeared as great imaginative or intuitive leaps, sometimes made by a single thinker but often by several people in a similar form at roughly the same time. These imaginative leaps have then been followed by a period of consolidation in which the dramatic new insight has been woven into the fabric of the general consciousness until it has become a commonplace. Who, now, doubts the Earth is round? But this was once a heretical thought. Then, when the time is again right, another great leap forward reveals a new perspective to be incorporated into man’s ever evolving understanding of the Universe.          —John Gribbin, White Holes – Cosmic Gushers in the Universe             Indexes/05