We learned to see, at long last. Partway through the millennium, we figured out how to shape and polish glass so as to see far and to see small, and we dug into dead languages of previous millenniums to name our new aids to seeing-telescope, microscope, spectroscope, spectrophotometer, spectroheliograph and, eventually, television. We figured out the art, the geometry and the semantics of perspective. No wonder our superheroes had X-ray vision; so did we. And infrared vision, and ultraviolet vision, and gamma-ray vision and nuclear-magnetic-resonant vision. We extended our sight far beyond the tiny spectrum our unaided eyes could handle, from violet to red. We looked out, and we looked inside. We saw where earth is and what humans are (if not quite who we are). We noticed quasars and we noticed viruses. Surprise! "In all falling rain, carried from gutters into water-butts, animalcules are to be found. in all kinds of water, standing in the open air, animalcules can turn up," noted Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the first man to observe bacteria. We figured out some things about color and space. "To myself," Isaac Newton remarked modestly, "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding amoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Then-and perhaps most important of all-we learned to see faster. Our sight expanded into the fourth dimension. It started innocently enough, with mundane items like railroad scheduling charts and weather histograms: new graphical representations of time. "Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record," said a famous fictional character, the Time Traveler of H. G. Wells, explaining the fourth dimension years before mathematicians and physicists had worked out the details. "This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized?" The hero of "The Time Machine" was a time traveler who used ivory levers and quartz rods. But Wells also invented another kind of time traveler, a Professor Gibberne, hero of a little-known story published at the turn of the century under the title "The New Accelerator." Professor Gibberne is a time traveler on drugs-really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life."