The Theory of Everything  Reading between the lines. April 1
1998 3:30 AM  The Theory of Everything  E.O. Wilson explains how
all knowledge fits together.  Consilience: The Unity of
Knowledge By Edward O. Wilson Alfred A. Knopf; 332 pages; $26
In his 1755 Dictionary, Samuel Johnson derided the idea that a
dictionary "can embalm his language, and secure it from
corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change
sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly,
vanity, and affectation." Few people today know what he meant by
the lovely word sublunary. Literally, it means "beneath the
moon," and Johnson was alluding to an ancient, widespread belief
that there was an unbreachable division between the cosmos,
thought to be pristine, lawful, and unchanging, and our grubby,
chaotic Earth below. The division was already obsolete by
Johnson's time: Newton had shown that a single set of laws
pulled the apple toward the ground and kept the moon in its
orbit around Earth.   E.O. Wilson has chosen another l