QUANTUM  PHYSICS:  BEYOND  COPENHAGEN  

Atomic  Theory  for  Total  Amateurs—A  History  of  the  Revolution  

QUANTUM PHYSICS FOR AMATEURS: A BRIEF HISTORY

Table of Contents

PREFACE: THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO SPIRITUALITY 1   Preliminary Chapter Outline

! The Cosmic Mystery: Johannes Kepler ! Celestial Mechanics: Isaac Newton ! It Started with a Light Bulb: Maxwell Planck ! Mind-Matter Symmetry: Louis de Broglie ! The Older Gentleman from Vienna: Erwin Schrödinger ! Two Knights of the Queen’s Empire: Jeans and & Eddington ! “God does not play dice!”: Albert Einstein ! The Conscience of Physics: Wolfgang Pauli ! Orthodox Quantum Mechanics: Niels Bohr ! Communication Breakdown: Werner Heisenberg ! “There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet”: Paul Dirac ! The First Disciple of Quantum Field Theory: Richard Feynman ! Quantum Consciousness: Eugene Wigner ! The Enfolded Order: David Bohm

o Hidden variable theories o Bohmian mechanics o Holonomic brain theory

! Spooky Action at a Distance: John Bell ! Turn on, Tune in, Drop out: Timothy Leary (at Harvard College)

o Aldous Huxley o Ram Dass o The Miracle of Marsh Chapel o Transcendental Meditation o Steve Jobs & Silicon Valley

o Genetics and Bioengineering: Schrodingerian & post-Schodingerian perspectives ! CIA Mind Games: MKUltra & Project Stargate ! Reinventing Fundamental Physics (at Berkeley)

o The Dancing Wu Li Masters o The Tao of Physics o Fritjof Capra o Nick Herbert o Fred Wolf o Henry Stapp o Stanford Research Institute

! The PEAR Tree: Robert Jahn (at Princeton U) o The Global Consciousness Project o Rupert Sheldrake o Dean Radin o Brian Josephson

! Quantum gravity: String theory & the Singularity o String theory & M-Theory: Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, John Hagelin o Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, OrchOR o Loop quantum gravity o The Cosmological Constant, Dark Matter, Dark Energy o Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge

! Quantum Computing, Quantum Cryptography, & Decoherence o Zurek, Decoherence o Gell-Mann, Sum Over Histories o Hartle, Consistent Histories o Omnes, Quantum Philosophy o Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology

! Dr. Strangelove: Julius Robert Oppenheimer ! The Participatory Universe: John Wheeler

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Preface: The Relation of Science to Spirituality Political strife and upheaval, environmental disaster, the rise of religious fanaticism and totalitarianism, the failure of modern psychiatry to alleviate the sufferings of the mentally ill, our most afflicted and dejected social members—the modern failings of the human mind are clear. As the successors of Einstein and Netwon, Kepler and Plato, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, we as a society are presently in grave spiritual danger, a danger largely of our own creation. Quantum physicist and theoretical biologist Erwin Schrödinger observed:

A sort of general atavism has set in; western man is in danger of relapsing to an earlier level of development which he has never properly overcome: crass, unfettered egoism is raising its grinning head, and its fist, drawing irresistible strength from primitive habits, is reaching for the abandoned helm of our ship.

Schrödinger further traced the root of this atavism:

Most of [our people] have nothing to hold on to and no one to follow. They believe neither in God nor gods; to them, the Church is now only a political party, and morality is nothing but a burdensome restriction which, without the support of those no longer credible bugbears on which it leant for so long, is now without any basis whatever.

One of the world’s first biotechnologists, Erwin Schrödinger wrote to his readers that a “blood transfusion” of thought would shortly be needed to “save Western science from spiritual anemia.” The world does not have to be this way. The idea that the conclusions of modern science must be branded as atheistic or in some way opposed to spirituality is simply incorrect and counterfactual, as unscientific as it is anti-historical. Such assertions run contrary to the practice of science throughout history and are generally founded on an insidious misunderstanding of the philosophy and history of our present day sciences. We must therefore ask the fateful question: what has modern physics to say about its encounter with human consciousness? Former Transcendental Meditation instructor and New Age guru Deepak Chopra smugly assures his large, Western following: “The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.” On the other hand, the New Atheists assure us this isn’t so, as per the religion-less spirituality advocated by neuroscientist Sam Harris, writing on the advice of his friend, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, a man who works with the quantum theory for a living:

Authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their hopes on misunderstandings of the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics,’ which they take as proof that consciousness plays a central role in determining the character of the physical world. If nothing is real until it is observed, consciousness cannot arise from

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electrochemical events in the brains of animals like ourselves; rather, it must be part of the very fabric of reality. But this simply isn’t the position of mainstream physics. It is true that, according to Copenhagen, quantum mechanical systems do not behave classically until they are observed, and before that they may seem to exist in many different states simultaneously. But what counts as “observation” under the original Copenhagen view was never clearly defined. The notion has been refined since, and it has nothing to do with consciousness.

As neither Chopra, nor Harris, nor Krauss has much (any) experience dealing with the philosophical foundations of physics, this is quite the misunderstanding indeed. To settle matters, Schrödinger tells us, we must go far back. Through the course of man’s slow emergence on Mother Earth, both spiritual and scientific knowledge must continue to form a counter-posed but nevertheless complimentary and inseparable idyllic pair of values to aid in our understanding the natural world. This was roughly the worldview of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Maxwell Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg among other visionaries of 20th century science, to shortly be explored in yet greater detail. It is the position of Cosmic Religion, “a new sort of religion,” so-designated by Albert Einstein:

God is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.

As a mere biologist, New Atheist Richard Dawkins is certainly not qualified to speak so authoritatively about the God of the physicist:

There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.

This liturgical, linguistic savvy simply amounts to a truism. Language is by definition contextual; therefore, language by necessity ought be considered metaphor. (Remember, Dawkins authored The Selfish Gene in 1976, wholeheartedly believing that Darwin’s “deadly blow” On the Origin of Species, combined with Mendel’s genetics and the discovery of the Crick-Watson structure of DNA, removed the need for God in biology. Chapter 3 of The Selfish Gene, which Dawkins later remarked could equally well be termed The Cooperative Gene, is entitled “Immortal Coils.”) Compare this Dawkins pseudo-commentary to the words of Erwin Schrödinger, close personal friend to Albert Einstein, writing in 1944 at the height of World War II about the physics of the living organism in the conclusion and epilogue to his aptly-named What is Life?:

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Please do not accuse me of calling the chromosome fibers just the ‘cogs of the organic machine’—at least not without a reference to the profound physical theories on which the simile is based…It needs still less rhetoric to recall the fundamental difference between the two and to justify the epithets novel and unprecedented in the biological case

[Among] the most striking features are…the fact that the single cog is not of coarse human make, but is the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the lines of the Lord’s quantum mechanics.

…is [this] not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke[?]

If Einstein wanted to write “Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things,” as Dawkins so effortlessly did, Einstein would have written so. But Einstein did not, instead consistently re-phrasing his problem with Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics:

As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world. Indeed, individual failings can undermine neither the truths glimpsed by the sciences nor those by religions. And again, this is not a statement that can be proven; rather, it is the pre-determined belief system of a large majority of theoretical physicists and psychologists that has been largely ignored by the prophets of New Atheism and the materialist domineers of academia. According to particle physicist Fritjof Capra’s counterculture classic, The Tao of Physics:

Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.

Aldous Huxley, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, completed The Perennial Philosophy, a study of comparative religion and mysticism, in 1945. Huxley tells us that

Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.

To understand Huxley’s belief in inner divinity, we must first recognize that though Man may become God, God may indeed still be dead. As Nietzsche phrased it in The Gay Science:

We have killed [God]. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean

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ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Albert Einstein put the problem of Man’s relation to God this way:

I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

One mustn’t therefore get too caught up on any single conception or definition of God. As Bohr forewarned, “we must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” Head propagandist to the American Revolution, a deist, a scientist, and a Renaissance man, Thomas Paine defined the goal of science thusly in The Age of Reason, the book that ultimately turned the whole country against him for questioning and insulting the Christian faith:

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.

As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made.

Nearly two centuries later, Schrödinger would express a deep and profound concern that the naturalism of science had becoming increasingly synonymous with the materialism of atheism:

The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell a word about the sensation of red and blue. Bitter or sweet, feelings of delight and sorrow. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

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Science is reticent too what it is a question of the great Unity of which we somehow form a part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God, with a capital “G.” Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we have said this is not astonishing. If its world picture does not even contain beauty, delight, sorrow, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to the human mind?

Quoting Schopenhauer from memory (himself quoting a poem from either “the Vedanta or the Bhagavadgita, which is inspired by the same spirit”), Schrödinger elaborates:

The one all-highest Godhead Subsiding in each being And living when they perish— Who this has seen, is seeing. For he who has that highest God in all things found, That man will of himself upon himself inflict no wound.

Einstein, having too read Schopenhauer during his own youth, references The World as Will and Representation in The World as I See It:

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,” has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others’. This feeling mercilessly mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.

Einstein continues:

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

It is with regard to the juxtaposition of these two opposites (“the eternity of life” and “an individual who should survive his physical death”) that one must consider Schrödinger’s preference for the immortality of the soul, a belief largely derived from Schopenhauer, Parmenides, and the Vedanta:

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Briefly stated, [I advocate] the view that all of us living beings belong together in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in Western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman.

This is hardly a different view from that of Spinoza (also a profound intellectual influence on Schrödinger), “for [whom] the human body is ‘a modification of the infinite substance (God), in so far as it is expressed in the attribute of extension’, and the human mind is that same modification, but expressed in the attribute of thought.” Consider Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Now, as Schrödinger sees it:

The structure of what I call my higher spiritual self is indeed essentially the direct consequence of ancestral events, but not exclusively nor principally within the limits of my physical ancestors. If what follows is to seem anything more than a bold piece of rhetorical trickery, it is necessary to be clear on one point concerning the two factors which determine an individual’s course of development, namely (a) the special arrangement of his genes, and (b) the special pattern of the environment which works on him; it is necessary, I say, to realize that these two factors are of quite the same nature, in that the special arrangement of the genes, with all the possibilities of development which it contains, has developed under the influence of and in essential dependence on earlier environments.

Therefore, it ought follow quite naturally that

The Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

The logical and ultimate conclusion of this train of thought, as Schrödinger sees it, is nothing less than immortality, since time is none other than a creation of the Self:

It is rather remarkable that whereas western philosophy has almost universally accepted the idea that the death of the individual does not put an end to anything that is of the essence of life, it has (with the exception of Plato and Schopenhauer) bestowed hardly a thought on this other idea, much deeper and more intimately joyful, which logically goes hand in hand with it: the idea that the same thing applies to individual birth, at which what happens is not that I am created for the first time but that I slowly awaken as though from a deep sleep. Then I can see my hopes and strivings, my fears and cares as the same as those thousands who have lived before me, and I may hope that future centuries may bring fulfillment to my yearnings of centuries ago. No seed of thought can germinate in

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me except as the continuation of some forebear; not really a new seed but the predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life.

Only now can we truly envisage what was at stake in Einstein’s qualm to Bohr about whether God can be said to play dice with the universe. If quantum events are truly random, then thoughts do and will in fact germinate without continuation, and the concept of a “predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life” is therefore rendered meaningless and antiquated. Schrödinger and Einstein both thought that Copenhagen was naïve with its interjection of “quantum jumps” and “quantum randomness,” though neither man was ultimately able to present a more successful theoretical model. We are thus left asking: what do quantum physics, the New Atheists, the psychedelic movement, and Indian poetry have in common? Unfortunately for New Atheism, the process of answering this single question will significantly undermine the worldview of academic materialism. But that is indeed for the collateral benefit of the rest of us. As Lawrence Krauss embarrassingly botches epistemology and metaphysics in his 2012 book, A Universe From Nothing:

If the laws of nature are stochastic and random, then there is no prescribed “cause” for our universe…Why is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately, this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why flowers are red and some are blue. “Something” may always come from nothing. It may be required, independent of the underlying nature of reality.

This simply begs the question and says nothing useful. Required by whom—us? If that’s the case, why should our collective pseudo-desire to inhabit some cosmos culminate in the existence of such an astral plane? He blunders metaphysics in the epilogue even more embarrassingly:

A God or a Nature that could encompasses a multiverse would be as constrained in the creation of a universe in which Einstein could ask the question as either would be if there is only one choice of a consistent physical reality.

I find oddly satisfying the possibility that, in either scenario, even a seemingly omnipotent God would have no freedom in the creation of our universe. No doubt because it further suggests that God is unnecessary—or at best redundant.

Schrödinger, a staunch German Idealist, deemed this outlook sophistry:

Now we are asked to believe that this special modification in the evolution of the higher mammals [the emergence of the brain as a highly specialized phenomenon] had to happen in order that the world should dawn itself in the light of consciousness; whereas, if it had not emerged, this world would have remained nothing but a drama played to an empty house, not present to anyone and hence not in the real sense present at all.

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If this is really the ultimate wisdom to which we can attain in this question, then to me it seems the utter bankruptcy of our picture of the world. And we ought at least to acknowledge it, and not act as though it did not matter to us, or jeer, in our rationalistic wisdom, at those who try to find a way out, however desperate.

Other founders of the quantum theory would likely and largely agree that Krauss’s quantum cosmological philosophy is a misuse of theoretical physics generally, the Big Bang model, or the theory of the primeval atom specifically, and the atomic theory especially. Compare Maxwell Planck, a self-confessed Christian:

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Niels Bohr, the principal author of Copenhagen, similarly held that

[Because of the] limited applicability of such customary idealizations [of the atomic theory] we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science […] when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

For Schrödinger, an atomic physicist and expert on statistical mechanics, “the powerful theory of heat and temperature” derived from the works of “the great Ludwig Boltzmann,” the atomic theory postulated a world of mere phantoms or archetypes, reminiscent of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Theory of the Forms, both concepts referenced in Chapter 5 (and beyond), “Science and Religion,” of Mind and Matter:

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life…The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Further clarifying that the atomic theory had in fact possessed “[its shadowy character] ever since Democritus of Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of it,” Schrödinger further claims that

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts.

For an atomic physicist, this leads to a counterintuitive and somewhat paradoxical conclusion:

The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing, in so far as both are constituted by the same primitive elements. But we are then hardly even using a different formula whether we express the essential community of these elements in all individuals by saying that there is only one external world or that there is only one consciousness.

We have then forgotten who we are. The Dancing Wu Li Masters defines our conflict succinctly:

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Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

Jung’s friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world…

If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. We must therefore again consider the Ethics of Einstein’s favorite philosopher, Spinoza:

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.

Einstein’s pseudo-religious qualms about the inadmissibility of quantum theory cannot be logically separated from his statements about the infinite Mind of God, made in line with the philosophy of Spinoza and the German Idealists to whom he likely subscribed:

Scientists such as Einstein and Poincare had insisted on the importance of intuition in creative thinking. Logic alone cannot lead to the discovery of scientific theories, they said.

Understood in light of the more recent speculation made by Sir Roger Penrose (itself inspired by the earlier conjectures of Maxwell Planck and Erwin Schrödinger regarding the distinction between mechanistic law—“order from order” and statistical law—“order from disorder”) that human consciousness is a non-algorithmic or quantum process, this is a telling suggestion about the nonlinear nature of the world indeed. Though drawing inspiration from his own intellectual progenitor, Wolfgang Pauli observed the human mind in a yet older veil:

because [Johannes Kepler] looks at the sun and the planets with this archetypal image in the background he believes with religious fervor in the helio-centric system… [It is his religious belief that impels] him to search for the true laws of planetary motion.

To Kepler, the Universe was “a triumph of geometry, the discipline which to him ranked highest among the sciences,” the helio-centric model an embodiment of “the very image of the Holy Trinity.” (Images of the wrathful Jewish God, the Christian Trinity, and the Indian Brahman will be again relevant on a later date, also pertaining also to lessons of atomic physics.)

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“God himself,” Kepler wrote in The Harmonies of The World (1618), “has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen,” and

I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years.

As Schrödinger previously observed, “no seed of thought can germinate…except as the continuation of some forebear.” For Pauli, this forebear was Kepler. To further complicate these matters of the spirit, Pauli and Heisenberg’s shared doctoral advisor Arnold Sommerfeld infamously agreed with Schrödinger’s assessment of the Bohr model: the strangeness of Bohr’s minimalistic approach to the mathematics of the atom, inserting “quantum jumps” and “quantum randomness,” was oddly “somewhat Kabbalistic” (though few present-day theoreticians agree). Two years before his death in 1961, Schrödinger would write in a letter:

With very few exceptions (such as Einstein and Laue) all the rest of the theoretical physicists were unadulterated asses and I was the only sane person left…The one great dilemma that ails us…day and night is the wave-particle dilemma.

He would go on:

If we are still going to put up with these damn quantum jumps, I am sorry that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.

And on:

I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum physics held today, I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago, when max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted by almost everybody.

Jotting further notes from Kepler’s documents, the Jewish quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, undergoing intensive psychotherapy from analytical psychologist (and student of mysticism, alchemy, and Gnosticism) Carl Jung as a means of dealing with his infidelity and alcoholism, found himself enamored by Johannes Kepler’s Medieval Christian Platonism:

The Mind of God, whose copy is here [on earth] the human mind, from its archetype retains the imprint of the geometrical data from the very beginnings of mankind.

Or again:

Reason is eternal. Therefore the geometrical figures are eternal; and in the Mind of God it has been true from eternity that, for example, the square of the side of a square equals half the square of the diagonal. Therefore, the quantities are the archetype of the world.

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As Schrödinger envisaged so many years ago, we need steer far clear the “bankrupts of modern rationalism” as well as the still-thinking silliness of faith and dogmatism, aiming instead for that high ideal of eternal reason, the spiritual driving force behind modern mystic man:

May we call a world that nobody contemplates even that? […] A world existing for many millions of years without any mind being aware of it, contemplating it, is it anything at all? Has it existed?

We are thus rightly cautioned:

[Faith] is all too ready to open to any silly nonsense that comes knocking gently at the door. Indeed, ‘miracle is faith’s dearest child’. And the more fine, subtle, abstract and sublime that faith may be, so much the more fearfully does man’s weak, fainting spirit snatch at miracles, however foolish, to be its stay and support.

de Broglie concurred, though with a somewhat different tone:

If we wish to give philosophic expression to the profound connection between thought and action in all fields of human endeavor, particularly in science, we shall undoubtedly have to seek its sources in the unfathomable depths of the human soul. Perhaps philosophers might call it “love” in a very general sense—that force which directs all our actions, which is the source of all our delights and all our pursuits. Indissolubly linked with thought and with action, love is their common mainspring and, hence, their common bond. The engineers of the future have an essential part to play in cementing this bond.

Having earlier linked the survival of living matter with the process of metabolism, that “chaos-reducing capability of consciousness,” Schrödinger would likely have found great inspiration in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, philosopher, evolutionist, and Jesuit priest, writing in 1934:

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them…Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

A mere 11 years later in July 1945, Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer would oversee the successful creation of atomic weaponry at Los Alamos, deployed first at a test site he code-named Trinity. In the aftermath of this subatomic fire first known only from the stars, Oppenheimer recounted how his own faith was rewarded:

We knew the world would not be the same [after Trinity]. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

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And what of the destruction? As the Hindu epic, the Gita, assures its readers, “those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead.” Schrödinger himself—now speaking from his expertise in cosmology and general relativity—renders the issue of death thusly, having previously assumed the “inadvisability of locating a man’s thoughts and ideas in his head”:

Materialism offers neither [ethical content nor deep religious consolation]; though there are many people who convince themselves that the idea which astronomy gives us of myriads of suns with, perhaps, inhabitable planets, and of a multitude of galaxies, each with myriads of such suns, and ultimately of a probably finite universe, affords us a sort of ethical and religiously consoling vision, mediated to our senses by the indescribable panorama of the starry heavens on a clear night. To me personally, all that is maya [illusion, a term from Buddhism and Vedanta], albeit maya in a very interesting form, exhibiting laws of great regularity. It has little to do with my eternal [genetic] inheritance (to express myself in a thoroughly medieval fashion). But that is a matter of taste.

Indeed, as Robert Anton Wilson writes of his Quantum Psychology, “Some say it’s materialistic, others call it scientific and still others insist it’s mystical. It’s all of these—and none.” Further clarifying his own Indian mysticism, Schrödinger ends What is Life?, his magnum opus of theoretical biology, with two metaphors:

In a dream we do perform several characters at the same but, but not indiscriminately: we are one of them; in him, we act and speak directly, while we often eagerly await the answer or response of another person, unaware of the fact that it is we who control his movements and his speech just as much as our own… Even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting our entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.

In a note to the epilogue, Schrödinger, something of a poet in his youth, comments:

The point of view taken here levels with what Aldous Huxley has recently—and very appropriately—called the The Perennial Philosophy. His beautiful book is singularly fit to explain not only the state of affairs, but also why it is so difficult to grasp and so likely to meet with opposition.

Accordingly, The New York Times deemed Huxley’s abiding analysis of spirituality and religious mysticism, “the most needed book in the world…a masterpiece.”

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[Werner Heisenberg] told me something interesting that I have never read anywhere, and that was that he was the guest of Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Indian poet and philosopher, when [he] was in India, and he had long discussions with Tagore about Indian philosophy, about Western science. And Heisenberg told me that these discussions had helped him very much because they had shown him that this new kind of worldview that was emerging from quantum physics was in fact not so crazy, that in fact there was an entire culture, the Indian culture, that was built on the premises of indeterminacy, relativity, interconnectedness, the dynamic nature of the world—the very concepts that emerged from physics. So Heisenberg was well aware of the parallels, and just to sum it up, he said to me when I closed my manuscript [to The Tao of Physics], verbatim, basically, I’m in full agreement with you. Now to me, as an unknown author, with a manuscript that was very difficult to sell to a publisher, this was of course extremely satisfying, and I left his office very happy, and it gave me a real impetus. —Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics (1975) and The Systems View of Life (2014)

The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing, in so far as both are constituted by the same primitive elements. But we are then hardly even using a different formula whether we express the essential community of these elements in all individuals by saying that there is only one external world or that there is only one consciousness. —Erwin Schrödinger, 1925 essay published in My View of the World (1960)

Those general notions about human understanding…which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in the Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. —J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, Director of the IAS

Slowly, almost unobserved, that spark of ancient Indian wisdom, which the marvelous Rabbi had kindled to new flame beside the Jordan, flickered out; the light faded from the re-born sun of Greece, whose rays had ripened the fruits we now enjoy. The people no longer know anything of these things. —Erwin Schrödinger, 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, Director of Dublin IAS

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I do not believe in the possible future of mysticism in the old form. However, I do believe that the natural sciences will out of themselves bring forth a counter pole in their adherents, which connects with the old mystic elements. —Wolfgang Pauli, 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. —Paul Dirac, 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics

Dirac disapproves quite particularly of the dishonesty and self-deception that are far too often coupled to religious thought. But in his abhorrence he has become a fanatic defender of rationalism, and I have the feeling that rationalism is not enough. —Werner Heisenberg, 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory…[we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted. —Niels Bohr, 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics

If [Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli] are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. — The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

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There must be thousands of young persons whose nervous systems were expanded and opened-up in the 1960s and who have now reached positions of competence in the sciences…We expect the new wave of turned-on young mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers are more able to use their energized nervous systems as tools to provide new correlations between psychology and science. —Clinical Psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary, Harvard Psychedelic Researcher

Our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century. It has also been generally forgotten that many of the patriarchs of physics in the first half of the twentieth century regularly impugned the “physicality” of the universe and placed mind—or thoughts, or consciousness itself—at the very wellspring of reality. Nonreductive views like those of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger seem to have had no lasting impact. —Neuroscientist Dr. Sam Harris, New Atheist, former drug user, Waking Up

The theory of growing disorder, or “increasing entropy”, is called the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is statistical…Generally speaking, individual subatomic particles are conceived as such conceptually isolated, short-lived entities that the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to them. It does apply, however, to molecules, which are quite complex compared to subatomic particles; to living cells, which are more complex than molecules; and to people, who are made of billions of cells. It is only at the subatomic, or quantum, level that the forward flow of time loses its significance. However, there is speculation, and some evidence, that consciousness, at the most fundamental levels, is a quantum process. The dark-adapted eye, for example, can detect a single photon. If this is so then it is conceivable that by expanding our awareness to include functions which normally lie beyond its parameters we can become aware of (experience) these processes themselves. If, at the quantum level, the flow of time has no meaning, and if consciousness is fundamentally a similar process, and if we can become aware of these processes within ourselves, then it is also conceivable that we can experience timelessness. If we can experience the most fundamental functions of our psyche, and if they are quantum in nature, then it is possible that the ordinary conceptions of space and time might not apply to them at all (as they don’t seem to apply in dreams). Such an experience would be hard to describe rationally (“Infinity in a grain of sand/And eternity in an hour”), but it would be very real, indeed. For this reason, reports of time distortion and timelessness from gurus in the East and psychotropic drug users in the West ought not, perhaps, to be discarded peremptorily. —The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics