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.
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.
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.
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.