Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists by Ken Wilber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Around the time when theoretical physics turned increasingly towards mathematical models to predict discoveries about our collective universe, many fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality also changed.
Previous to the discovery of the quantum world, and the revolutions of general and special relativity, Newton’s scientific research program dominated the sciences. The aesthetics of this Newtonian world view specified scientific Truth, a dogma that militantly eschewed religion, mysticism and other “subjective” world views. Much of our ideas about the nature of science and religion still originate from the stranglehold of science, as it dominated the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries until Einstein presented a more exacting order of things… for example, some physicists and atheists alike will claim that religion is outdated, or that science can provide all the mystical answers in a clearer way than religion has.
This book states the opposite. In this wonderful collection, we have “mystical writings of the world’s greatest physicists”, all of which proclaim that science has its place (and limits) and religion with mysticism has its place in our human world. For to be a complete human being, we would need both.. and as more than one physicist wrote, you need faith first and foremost before you can even proceed into the unknown domains that are science’s areas of study.
While the message was a little repetitive, I did get a good sense that these amazing men, who shook the foundations of our world, came away from their search for the real substance, a deeply profound respect for the mysteries of being and the universe. Rather than discarding the work of humans for thousands of years (in areas of religion) they turned back to these areas with a greater respect after tackling basic questions about the nature of reality. The editor, Ken Wilber, did well to end with Sir Arthur Eddington. Eddington’s lucid remarks on how understanding reality through mathematics and how this compares to religion goes at great lengths to demonstrate just how in the search for making sense of the world, we end with equations that nearly make no sense in themselves, leaving more questions than answers.
After all, science is to be the study of what is. That doesn’t necessarily even begin to address how we should be, or what has meaning or how meaning even comes about. We’ve got a long way to go before these two different areas can even begin to rightly address one another in ways that make any consistent sense.
