What the nature of that final stage is—how an individual invents (or finds he had invented) a new way of giving order to data now assembled—must here remain inscrutable and maybe permanently so. Let us note only one thing about. Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Kierk sets down Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and leans against the stacks in the cooler airs of the library. He repeats the passage, two, three times to himself to recommit it to memory. He’s spent the last hour browsing the stacks or in the reading room with his feet up, balancing his chair on its back legs, reading Husserl.

When he heads back to the lab the passage plays on repeat in his mind. He stops on a sidewalk bisected by the sharply thrown evening shadows of buildings, completely still, as a vision comes to him. His readings have prompted a series of abstract visualizations as he realizes that science itself can be seen as a kind of continuous metaphoric riff, a poem that starts with base everyday concepts and then proceeds by mapping them onto nature in ever more complex combinations, an endless metaphor proclaiming that x is like y is like z, that atoms are like solar systems, that nature takes the place of the breeder in natural selection, that the human brain operates hydraulically via tubes like an aqueduct, or with mechanistic gears like a clock, or carries digital information like a computer . . . this is like this is like that, a staircase of mappings, with Parnassus always retreating before the canticle of science. The Long Song. And when it’s over? At the end of science, when all the questions have been answered, is that not when humankind’s work truly begins in the construction of the one true religion? What will those cathedrals look like? Erected on strange worlds, against skies so different from our own . . . Looking up at the blinding coin of the sinking sun Kierk imagines a firmament filled instead by the dense cluster of the center of the galaxy, against which grand temples stand in sharp twilight silhouette.

At that moment, if you zoomed out above Kierk, the surrounding city blocks would be cinemas of motion, with the blurs of people flowing like red blood cells through an artery as the shadows retreat and lengthen, and at the foci of the camera would be Kierk, an unmoving dot, a fixed point.