The James Webb Space Telescope has done something rare: it has reminded a distracted public that the universe is astonishing. Its images of the Carina Nebula, of galaxy clusters magnified by gravitational lensing, of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, are not merely scientific data — they are encounters.
Behind each photograph lies a triumph of patient engineering: a sunshield the size of a tennis court, mirrors of beryllium coated in gold, an orbit at the second Lagrange point. But the true gift is perceptual. We are looking, again, with new eyes.