Only a fool would try to place limits on the reach of science, which fumbles upward by trial and doubt.

To be clear, I’m all in favor of reaching for whichever stars — so to speak — might be calling to you. But at the risk of sounding incurious or unscientific, there are some questions that I’m not sure I want answered.

It’s not that I don’t want them solved. No, I worry that I might be disappointed by the Big Reveal, in the way old horror movies were scarier when you never saw the monster.

Jim Peebles, the famed cosmologist at Princeton University, once told me that if someone offered him a tablet of stone that held all the answers to the mysteries of the universe — how old it is, where it’s going — he would throw it away.