quantum physics for amateurs: a brief history

7/26/2019 Quantum Physics for Amateurs: A Brief History

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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



1

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, ourmost 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. Quantumphysicist 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 israising 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 isnothing 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 “bloodtransfusion” 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 bebranded 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 theobserver. 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 spiritualityadvocated by neuroscientist Sam Harris, writing on the advice of his friend, theoretical physicistLawrence Krauss, a man who works with the quantum theory for a living:

Authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their hopes onmisunderstandings 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 istrue 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 hasnothing 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 lawgiverlook? Certainly not like a man magnified.

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

There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is notmalicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating theUniverse?’ 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 isStephen 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 definitioncontextual; therefore, language by necessity ought be considered metaphor. (Remember,

Dawkins authored The Selfish Gene in 1976, wholeheartedly believing that Darwin’s “deadlyblow” 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 theliving 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 organicmachine’—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 soeffortlessly 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 largelyignored 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 ofprimitive 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 andagain, 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 maybecome 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 deathunder 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 godssimply 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 inmany 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 theattitude 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 modernthought. 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 Bohrforewarned, “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 thatultimately 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, ofwhich astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of thepower 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 hehas 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 factualinformation, 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 aword 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 acapital “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 feelingmercilessly 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 hisphysical 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 thatmanifests 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’spreference 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 inWestern 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), inso 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 directconsequence of ancestral events, but not exclusively nor principally within the limits ofmy 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 onhim; 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 earlierenvironments.

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 theessence 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 goeshand 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 maybring 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 “predeterminedunfolding 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 his2012 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 tohappen 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 toacknowledge 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 quantumcosmological 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 atomictheory] we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science […] when trying toharmonize 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 atomictheory 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 mostsignificant 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 areconstituted 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:



9

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, ithappens 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, theysaid.

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”) thathuman 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 hisreligious 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’sminimalistic 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 greatdilemma 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 hadanything 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 yearsago, when max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted byalmost 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 ithas 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 thathigh 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 atall? 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 thoughtand 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 linkedwith 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 recountedhow 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 fromhis 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 thereare 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 indescribablepanorama 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.” Furtherclarifying his own Indian mysticism, Schrödinger ends What is Life?, his magnum opus oftheoretical 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 theanswer 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 andreligious 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 Indianculture, that was built on the premises of indeterminacy, relativity, interconnectedness, thedynamic 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 areconstituted 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 bysaying 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 inatomic 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 moreconsiderable 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 sunof 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 thatthe 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 highorder, 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 ofrationalism, 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 ofconsciousness.

— 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 thesciences…We expect the new wave of turned-on young mathematicians, physicists, andastronomers 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 twentiethcentury 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 ofArthur 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, tomolecules, 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 onlyat 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 asingle 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 tothem 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 veryreal, 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

quantum physics for amateurs: a brief history

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