ARMSTRONG, NEIL
Mystery creates
wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand. Quoted in The Magnificent Desolation, IMAX.
Anyone
who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Quoted by N.C. Panda, Maya
in Physics, p. 73.
CHARGAFF, ERWIN
It is the sense
of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind
force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If [the scientist] has not experienced, at
least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this
confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears,
he is not a scientist. “Engineering a Molecular Nightmare.” Nature
327 (May 21, 1987), p. 199.
de DUVE, CHRISTIAN
The advances of
biology have revolutionized the view we have of ourselves and our significance
in the world. Many myths have had to be
abandoned. But mystery remains, more
profound and more beautiful than ever before, a reality almost inaccessible to
our feeble human means. Many Worlds: Life’s Lessons
EINSTEIN, ALBERT
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of
the mysterious. It is the underlying
principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor
in art and in science ... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not
dead, then at least blind. The sense
that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind
cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as
feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets
and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure
of all that there is. "My
Credo" 1932.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for
existing. One cannot help but be in awe
when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if
one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Quoted by Michael Reagan in
The Hand of God, p. 92.
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge
library. The walls are covered to the
ceilings with books in many different tongues.
The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which
they are written. But the child notes a
definite plan in the arrangement of the books.....a mysterious order which it
does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. ibid. p.
124.
I have come to suspect that this long descent down the ladder of life, beautiful and instructive though it may be, will not lead us to the final secret. In fact I have ceased to believe in the final brew or the ultimate chemical. There is, I know, a kind of heresy, a shocking negation of confidence in blue-steel microtomes and men in white in making such a statement. I would not be understood to speak ill of scientific effort, for in simple truth I would not be alive today except for the microscopes and the blue steel. It is only that somewhere among the seeds and beetle shells and abandoned grasshopper legs I find something that is not accounted for very clearly in the dissections to the ultimate virus or crystal or protein particle. Even if the secret is sontained in these things, in other words, I do not think it will yield to the kind of analysis our science is capable of making. The Immense Journey, p. 202.
I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life, that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea and living batteries in the waters of the tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if “dead” matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, “but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.” ibid., p. 210.
I have come to believe that in the world there is nothing to explain the world. Nothing in nature can separate the existent from the potential. All the Strange Hours, p. 238.
There is a persistent adage in science that one must not multiply hypotheses unduly and without reason. I grant its usefulness. Nevertheless it can sometimes lead to the assumption that science finds nature simple and that someday all will be known. Vain delusion, incredible folly, I thought, brooding there at sundown over the sleeping surgeons known as Sphex. We, our species, will be gone before we know. ibid., p. 245.
All this is part of the human inheritance, the wonder of the world, and nowhere does that wonder press closer to us than in the guise of animals which, whether supernaturally as in the caves of our origins or, as in Darwin’s sudden illumination, are perceived to be, at heart, one form, one awe-inspiring mystery, seemingly diverse and apart but derived from the same genetic source. Thus the mysterium arose not by primitive campfires alone. Skins may still prickle in a modern classroom
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail’s eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about. “Science and the Sense of the Holy,” in The Star Thrower, p. 151.
One can only assert that in science, as in religion, when one has destroyed human wonder and compassion, one has killed man, even if the man in question continues to go about his laboratory tasks. ibid., pp. 158-159.
FARADAY, MICHAEL
Nothing is too wonderful to be
true. (Engraved on the Physics Building,
UCLA) Quoted by Philip Morrison in Nothing is Too
Wonderful to be True, p. ix.
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can
possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down
the drain”, into a blind alley from which no one has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. The Character of Physical Law, p. 129.
FLEXNER,
ABRAHAM
We have become increasingly and painfully aware of our
abysmal ignorance. No scientist, fifty years ago, could have realized that he
was as ignorant as all first-rate scientists now know themselves to be. It was
but recently that we believed that Newton had arrived at rock-bottom. Universities: American, English,
German (Oxford University Press, 1930) pp. 17-18.
GLEISER, MARCELO
The second
reason to start this discussion with creation myths is more subtle. These myths are essentially religious, an
expression of awe as different cultures face the mystery of Creation. It is this very same awe that motivates much
of the scientific creative process. My
point is that this awe itself is more primitive than the particular way
by which we choose to express it, be it in terms of organized religion or
science.
Mysticism, if understood as the embodiment of our irresistible
attraction to the unknown, plays a fundamental role in the scientific
creative process of many physicists, past and present. Neglecting this fact is closing our eyes to
history and overlooking an essential aspect of science. In order to understand the roots of what
might be called rational mysticism, we now turn our attention to the
creation myths of prescientific civilizations. The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths
to the Big Bang, page 4.
The science-religion debate is usually restricted to how compatible the
two are: Can a person approach the world scientifically and still be
religious? I think the answer is an
obvious yes, as long as the inquiries don’t interfere with each other the wrong
way. Scientists should not apply science
abusively to situations where it is still clearly speculative, and claim they
understand questions of theological nature.
Religious people should not try to interpret religious texts
scientifically, as they were not written for that purpose. To me, what is truly fascinating is that both
science and religion express our reverence for nature. Their complementarity
is manifest in the essentially religious motivation of many of the scientific
heroes of every era. The awe that moved
them, and that moves me into being a scientist today, is in essence the same
awe that moved the mythmakers of times past.
As we, in the silent confines of our offices, address the most
fundamental questions about the Universe scientifically, we can hear, under the
monotonous humming of our computers, the chants of our ancestors echoing
through time, inviting us to sing along. ibid. pp. 21-22
The more I learned about relativity, quantum mechanics, and how they are
applied to the study of cosmology, the more I wanted to learn. And as usual, the more you learn, the more
you realize how little you know, how limited we are when facing the infinite
creative power of nature. Science is a
process, it has often been said. I would
add that science is an endless process, that we will never reach an end, simply
because there is no end. Whenever I hear
pronouncements claiming “the end of science,” asserting that all great
discoveries that should have been made have already been made, I shudder with
disbelief. Can people be so blind to
history and to our vast ignorance? Just
think of Laplace’s “supermind,” or the state
of confidence of many late-nineteenth-century physicists, and how completely
wrong and taken aback they were in their illusions. I wonder how much of this confidence of
having reached an end is an expression of unrealized dreams and fantasies.
Nature will never cease to surprise and to amaze us. Our theories of today, of which we are
justifiably proud, will be child’s play for future generations of scientists.
Our models of today will be poor approximations to future models. And yet, the work of future scientists will
not be possible without ours, just as ours would not have been possible without
Kepler’s or Galileo’s or Newton’s. Science is never completely “right”,
scientific theories are never the final truth.
They evolve and change, get corrected and more efficient, but are never
finished. Strange new phenomena will
always defy our imagination, those we weren’t expecting or couldn’t have
predicted. We will scramble to
understand the new, just as we have ever done.
And through this endless pursuit, we will continue to make sense of
ourselves and of the world around us, just as we have ever done.
To a smaller or larger extent, we all take part in this adventure; we
all share in the rapture of discovery, if not by being directly involved in
research, then at least by understanding the ideas of those who expand our
human boundaries through their creativity.
In this sense, you, me, Heraclitus, Copernicus,
and Einstein are all partners in the rhythmic dance of the Universe. It is the persistence of the mysterious that
moves us on. ibid. pp. 311-312.
How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans
ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left
brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed
over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our
hearts, from our souls. A Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
Now, with our understanding of Nature arguably better than our
understanding of persons, Nature can take its place as a strange but wondrous
given.
The realization that I needn’t have answers to the Big Questions,
needn’t seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany. I lie on my back under the stars and the
unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances,
in impermanence, the fact of it all.
I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the fact of
photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless
at high temperatures. I take in the
abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me, like Gregorian
chants, the meaning of the words not mattering because the words are so
haunting.
Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can
emancipate. As I allow myself to
experience cosmic and quantum Mystery, I join the saints and the visionaries in
their experience of what the called the Divine, and I
pulse with the spirit, if no the words, of my favorite hymn:
Immortal,
invisible, God only wise,
In
light inaccessible hid from our eyes.
…
All
laud we would render: O help us to see
‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth
thee.
The Sacred Depths of Nature, pp. 12-14.
HAWKING, STEPHEN
What is it that
breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of
existing? A Brief History of Time, p. 174.
LIGHTMAN,
ALAN
A
long time later, after I became a novelist, I realized that the ambiguities and
complexities of the human mind are what give fiction and perhaps all art its
power. A good novel gets under our skin, provokes us and haunts us long after
the first reading, because we never fully understand the characters. We sweep
through the narrative over and over again, searching for meaning. Good characters must retain a certain mystery
and unfathomable depth, even for the author. Once we see to the bottom of their
hearts, the novel is dead for us.
Eventually, I learned to appreciate both certainty and uncertainty. Both
are necessary in the world. Both are
part of being human. A Sense of the Mysterious, pp. 10-11.
I have since come to understand that there are many interesting problems
that are not well posed in the Popper or Thorne sense. For example: Does God
exist? Or, What is love? Or, Would
we be happier if we lived a thousand years? These questions are terribly
interesting, but they lie outside the domain of science. Never will a physics
student receive his or her degree working on such a question. One cannot
falsify the statement that God exists (or does not exist). One cannot falsify
the statement that we would be happier (or not happier) if we lived longer. Yet
these are fascinating questions, questions that provoke us and bring forth all
kinds of creative thought and invention. For many artists and humanists, the
question is more important than the answer. One of my favorite passages from
Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet is
this: “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and
like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Science is powerful, but
it has limitations. Just as the world needs both certainty
and uncertainty, the world needs questions with answers and questions without
answers. ibid. p.
20.
Then I felt a sense of mystery. I had shed light on a small corner of
nature. Other scientists had illuminated larger corners. But there were almost
certainly vast chambers and ballrooms that remained in the dark. So many beautiful and strange things as yet unknown. In an
article published in Forum and Century
magazine in 1931, Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is
the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of
true art and true science.” What did Einstein mean by “the mysterious”? I don’t
think he meant that science is full of unpredictable or unknowable or
supernatural forces. I believe that he meant a sense of awe, a sense that there
are things larger than us, that we do not have all the answers at this moment. A sense that we can stand right at the edge between known and
unknown and gaze into that cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened.
Just as Einstein suggested, I have experienced that beautiful mystery both as a
physicist and as a novelist. As a physicist, in the infinite
mystery of physical nature. As a novelist, in the
infinite mystery of human nature and the power of words to portray some of that
mystery. ibid. pp. 41-42
What is not generally appreciated is that serious scientists experience
a sense of awe. They are usually drawn
to ask questions about a particular thing in the natural world. It may be flowers or stars, or it may be
something that other people do not care for at all – toads, beetles,
tapeworms. Whatever it might be, the
study of this thing moves them to reverence.
And make no mistake, this sense of reverence is
real. Scientists can sense the vastness
of even the smallest things. They know
that these things have unending connections with the rest of life. For that reason, their experience of wonder
does not vanish when the questions have been answered. To the real scientist, a question that has
been answered becomes not less wonderful, but more so. Increased understanding increases scientific
awe. And most great scientists have
named awe of this kind as their deepest reason for pursuing science at
all. “The Need for Wonder” in God for
the 21st Century, Russell Stannard, ed. Pp. 186-187.
NEWTON, ISAAC
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in
now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. World of Mathematics,
Vol. I, p. 271.
PRESTON, RICHARD
Science
at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not
about self-evident facts. It is about
mystery and not knowing. It is about
taking huge risks. It is about wasting
time, getting burned, and failing. It is
like trying to crack a monstrous safe that has a complicated, secret lock
designed by God. Quoted
by Michael Reagan in The Hand of God, p. 42.
Our account of
the world must be rich enough – have a thick enough texture and a sufficiently
generous rationality – to contain the total spectrum of human meeting with
reality. The procrustean
oversimplification of a fundamentalist reductionism will not begin to
suffice. In fact, it cannot even embrace
the practice of science itself, which calls for judgements
of value (we seek elegant and economic theories) and whose chief reward is the
experience of wonder at the rational beauty of the world. Beyond Science, p.
2.
In science the beautiful is the good because it has proved to be the
fertile. Dirac’s lifetime search for
beautiful equations is an object lesson that this is so, as is Einstein’s
discovery of general relativity through a similar eight-year quest. Such uncovenanted fruitfulness impels
the conviction that scientific theory is on to something, that these beautiful
equations do indeed describe a true aspect of reality. Their existence corresponds to another
value–laden aspect of the scientific life, the experience of wonder at the
deeply satisfying structures of the physical world revealed to our
inquiry. Here is the reward for all our
weariness and frustration that are inescapable components of any serious
scientific investigation, as in any other kind of worthwhile activity. In our human nature, not only has the
universe become aware of itself, it rejoices in that awareness. ibid. p. 105.
A word that is
commonly used among scientists is wonder, though you won’t often see that word
used in their scientific papers. Doing research is laborious, and often the
reward for all that is the sense of wonder that people get from time to time.
Scientists’ experience of wonder is, in a sense, an act of worship. Interview with Daniel Burke, April 15, 2009.
POLLARD, W.G.
J. Robert
Oppenheimer (in Science and the Common Understanding) has likened all of
science to a vast underground palace with an unending series of interconnected
rooms. At first as we began to explore
the antechambers near the entrance, it seemed a familiar building of limited
size much like other buildings we were familiar with. But as this century has advanced, unsuspected
rooms have been entered and surprising interconnecting passageways
discovered. Each new room or suite of
rooms has been full of surprises, strange new beauties, and unsuspected
wonders. Yet each time we began to think
that we had reached the palace boundary and were in the innermost rooms, hidden
doorways have been stumbled upon, which have led us into still deeper and more
amazing sections of the palace. Transcendence
and Providence, pp. 244-245.
Science is not
about control. It is about cultivating a
perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one
step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. Dialogue from The
Goldberg Variations
RAYMO, CHET
It is the nature of God to reside in mystery – ineluctable,
inexhaustible mystery. We do not need to
understand the cabala of mathematical physics to apprehend the mysterium tremendum.
We need only look out the window. Skeptic
and True Believers, p. 202.
No theory conceived by the human mind will ever be final. The universe is vast, marvelous, and deep
beyond our knowing; its horizons will always recede before our advance. All dreams of finality are (probably) futile.
ibid. p. 207.
The God of the spiraling powers resides in nature beyond all metaphors,
beyond all scriptures, beyond all ‘final theories.’ It is the ground and source of our sense of wonderment,
of power, of powerlessness, of light, of dark, of meaning, and of
bafflement. It is the God whose history
began with the first human who experienced awe, contingency, fear. It is the God of mystics of all cultures and
creeds. We stand on the shore of
knowledge and look out into the sea of mystery and speak his name. His name eludes all creeds and all theories
of science. He is indeed the ‘dread
essence beyond logic.’ Science extends the shore along which we are able to
perceive the mystery, but it does not deplete the mystery. As knowledge deepens, so does wonder. ibid. p. 214
The poet Mary Oliver writes: Still,
what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the
weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult
world. I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery”.
Oliver does not denigrate facts.
Her poetry is filled with precise observations of the natural world that
match in their exactitude those of any scientist; this is one reason I find her
work so attractive. Her exact knowledge
of nature is the springboard from which she dives into the white fire of
mystery. She asks to be willing to be
dazzled. She asks for more than the
weight of facts. ibid.,
pp. 230-231.
Even today, in our technically sophisticated times, a view of the night
sky from a dark place – Hyakutake on its westward
arch, Venus among the Pleiades, the Moon rising in eclipse – cannot fail to
inspire dreams of a grandeur and a meaning greater than ourselves. But there is more, much more.. (Raymo goes on to describe
various remarkable astronomical images including the Hubble Deep Field and
concludes) Who can look at these images
and not be transformed? The heavens declare
God’s glory. “The work of the eyes is done, now/go and do heart-work,” says the
poet Rainer Maria Rilke. ibid., pp. 247-249
Knowledge is an island. The
larger we make that island, the longer becomes the
shore where knowledge is lapped by mystery.
It is the most common of all misconceptions about science that it is
somehow inimical to mystery, that it grows at the
expense of mystery and intrudes with its brash certitudes upon the space of
God. Aristarchus and Galileo felt the
harsh consequences of that misconception.
But in a world described by science, mystery abides, in the space
between the stars and in the interstices of snow. The extension of knowledge is the extension
of mystery. It is as Bernard says: “As a
bee bears both honey and wax, so he has in himself both that which ignites the
light of knowledge and that which infuses the taste of grace.” Honey from Stone, p. 66.
SAGAN, CARL quoted by
Richard Dawkins
“How is it that
hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets
said, grander, more subtle, more elegant? Instead they say, No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to
stay that way. A religion, old or new,
that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science
might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the
conventional faiths.” quoted by Richard Dawkins in Science & Spirit
Magazine July/August, 1999, page 25.
TEILHARD de CHARDIN, PIERRE
Less and less do I see any difference
now between research and adoration. Quoted by Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers, p. 264.
THOMAS, LEWIS
It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science
teaching…Science, especially twentieth-century science, has provided us with a
glimpse of something we never really knew before, the revelation of human
ignorance. We have been used to the
belief, down one century after another, that we more or less comprehend
everything, bar one or two mysteries, like the mental processes of our
gods. Every age, not just the eighteenth
century, regarded itself as the Age of Reason, and we have never lacked for
explanations of the world and its ways.
Now, we are being brought up short, and this has been the work of
science. We have a wilderness of mystery
to make our way through in the centuries ahead, and we will need science for
this, but not science alone…
I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from
grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics,
aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of the students on the things
that are not known. You cannot
possible teach quantum mechanics without mathematics, to be sure, but you can
describe the strangeness of the world opened up by quantum theory. Let it be known, early on, that there are
deep mysteries and profound paradoxes, revealed in their distant outlines, by
the quantum. Let it be known that these
can be approached more closely, and puzzled over, once the language of
mathematics has been sufficiently mastered.
Teach at the outset, before any of the fundamentals,
the still imponderable puzzles of cosmology.
Let it be known, as clearly as possible, by the youngest minds, that
there are some things going on in the universe that lie beyond comprehension,
and make it plain how little is known….
The worst thing that has happened to science education is that the great
fun has gone out of it…. Very few see science for the high adventure it really
is, the wildest of all explorations ever undertaken by human beings, the chance
to catch close views of things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for
discovering how the world works. Instead,
they become baffled early on, and they are misled into thinking that bafflement
is simply the result of not having learned all the facts. They are not told, as they should be told,
that everyone else – from the professor in his endowed chair down to the
platoons of postdoctoral students in the laboratory all night – is baffled as
well. Every important scientific advance
that has come looking like and answer has turned, sooner or later – usually
sooner – into a question. And the game
is just beginning…. Part of the intellectual equipment of an educated person,
however his or her time is to be spent, ought to be a feel for the queerness of
nature, the inexplicable things. “Humanities and Science,” in Late Night Thoughts on Listening to
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, pp. 150-155.
What we have been learning in our time
is that we really do not understand this place or how it works, and we
comprehend our selves least of all. And
the more we learn, the more we are - or ought to be - dumbfounded. “ On Matters of Doubt,” in Late Night Thoughts on
Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, p. 157.
WILSON, E. O.
“Our sense of wonder grows
exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery.” Biophilia,
p. 10.