PIET HUT is a professor of astrophysics and interdisciplinary studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the coauthor (with Douglas Heggie) of The Gravitational Million-Body Problem: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Star Cluster Dynamics.
Copernicus and Darwin took away our traditional place in the world and our traditional identity in the world. What traditional trait will be taken away from us next? My guess is that it will be the world itself. We see the first few steps in that direction in the physics, mathematics, and computer science of the twentieth century—from quantum mechanics to the results obtained by Gödel, Turing, and others. The ontologies of our world, concrete as well as abstract, have already started to melt away.
Copernicus upset the moral order by dissolving the strict distinction between heaven and earth. Darwin did the same by dissolving the strict distinction between humans and other animals. Could the next step be the dissolution of the strict distinction between reality and fiction? For this to be shocking, it has to come in a scientifically respectable way, as a precise and inescapable conclusion; it should have the technical strength of a body of knowledge like quantum mechanics, as opposed to collections of opinions on the level of cultural relativism.
Perhaps a radical re-evaluation of the character of time will do it. In everyday experience time flows, and we flow with it. In classical physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And there is as yet no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum mechanics. What if a future scientific understanding of time were to show all previous pictures to be wrong and demonstrate that past, future, and even the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual personal history and future are all just wrong? Now, that would be a dangerous idea!