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Raphael placed me at the centre of his fresco in the Vatican — walking alongside Plato, my hand extended flat toward the earth while his points upward to the sky. He has understood the essential difference between us: Plato believed that reality was in the Forms, in the eternal and invisible. I believed that reality was here, in the things we can touch and dissect and classify.

I am grateful for the compliment. I am less grateful that for a thousand years after my death my books were used as a substitute for observation rather than a reason to observe.