“O Newton! With the range of your intelligence and the sublime nature of your genius, you have defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of enveloping you with your discovery. That is as it were to envelop you in your own self.” So the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée described his 1784 proposal for a Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, an enormous, unadorned sphere, some 500 feet in diameter and rising out of a tiered base, its interior empty apart from a sarcophagus and a pattern of tiny openings representing the constellations of the night sky. Monument as earth, scientist at the center of the cosmos: this is the imagery of the Enlightenment, awesome and terrible in its hubristic scale.