Astrophysicists anxiously await the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for December 18. Things can go wrong. This spectacular giant will be the most powerful space telescope ever built, opening new windows to nascent galaxies and stars from billions of years ago, as well as to planets circling other stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It will help us refine our own story — a story of our origins and how similar and different we are to the rest of the universe. The history of science could be written as a history of instrumentation. From particle accelerators and microscopes to fMRIs and telescopes, as instruments become more powerful, they act as reality amplifiers: they magnify our view of the very small and the very large, allowing us a glimpse of what is invisible t
