Astronomy, from the Greek astron, star, plus nomos, law—thus the laws or regular patterns of the stars—is now defined as the science of objects beyond the Earth's atmosphere, including their physical and chemical properties. This science of what is beyond the Earth paradoxically served as the model for the early modern effort to create a science of terrestrial phenomena. Because of their apparently more simple and necessary order, astral phenomena were the first to be subject to explanations in the form of "laws," the methods of which were then extended in modern physics to explain the dynamics of falling bodies at or near the Earth. Yet just as modern physics emerged to give human beings greater powers over material affairs than ever before, and thus pose a challenge to ethics, so subsequent developments in astronomy deprived humans of an order that could be perceived as a...