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Passion is clearly necessary for a truly great idea to take hold among a people—passion on the part of the original thinker, of the public, or ideally both. The claim that the most fruitful subject for inspiring great ideas is "ordinary things" may at first seem counterintuitive. After all, aren't great ideas usually marked by their extraordinary character? While this is true, their extraordinary character often derives directly from their insight into things that had until then gone unquestioned. Although great ideas can certainly arise through an innovation that seems purely original... take, for example, Big Bang cosmology, which developed nearly all of its own scientific and philosophical premises through its own process of formation, it is equally true that such innovative thinking was, and still is, largely a reassessment of earlier assumptions in a radical way... After all, the question of the ultimate nature of the universe and of humanity's place within it has been central to human thought since the dawn of time. Ordinary things are, additionally, necessary as raw material for generating the "best ideas," since surely success with the public must be taken into account when assessing the importance and quality of an idea. The advent of Big Bang cosmology, which arose in rudimentary form almost immediately after Edwin Hubble's first observations through the Hooker telescope in California in the early 20th century, was the most significant advance in humanity's understanding of the universe in more than 400 years. The seemingly simple fact that everything in the universe, on a very large scale, is moving away from everything else in...