The physicists who read the mystics

The teaching

As the record of what these physicists wrote and said teaches it.

Schrödinger: the one mind

Erwin Schrödinger closes What Is Life? with a short argument from two premises. His body works as a pure mechanism according to the laws of nature. Yet he knows by direct experience that he directs its motions, foresees their effects and takes responsibility for them. The only way to hold both, he concludes, is that I, in the widest sense of the word, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt I, am the one who controls the motion of the atoms according to the laws of nature.

He finds the same conclusion in the Upanishads, in the teaching that Atman is Brahman: the personal self is the eternal self that is everywhere. Consciousness, he observes, is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. There is only one thing, and what seems a plurality is a series of different aspects of it, produced by a deception, which the Indian teaching calls maya.

Schrödinger: the subject left out

In Mind and Matter he explains why physics cannot find the mind in its picture of the world. Science builds that picture by what he calls the principle of objectivation: it leaves the knowing subject out and treats the world as something observed from outside, so that the observer is never in it. A mind left out by method cannot then be found in the result. For the same reason, he says, the scientific picture is silent on all that is closest to our hearts: colour as it is seen, joy and sorrow, beauty and meaning.

Bohr: complementarity

Niels Bohr's principle starts from the experiments themselves. Light and matter show the behaviour of waves in some arrangements and of particles in others, and the two pictures exclude each other: no single experiment shows both at once. Yet each is needed for a complete account. The two descriptions are, in his word, complementary, mutually exclusive and jointly necessary. And since what is seen depends on the whole experimental arrangement, the arrangement must be part of any description of what happened.

Bohr carried the idea far beyond physics. He saw a complementary pair in biology, between the analysis of an organism down to its atoms, which would kill it, and the life that the analysis sets out to study; in the mind, between the analysis of a thought or a feeling and its immediate use; and in human affairs, between justice and charity. When he was honoured with a coat of arms he chose the yin and yang, with the motto that opposites are complementary. For a parallel to the lesson of atomic physics, he wrote, one must turn to the problems that thinkers such as the Buddha and Lao Tzu met when they tried to reconcile our place as both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

Heisenberg: potentia and form

Werner Heisenberg read the Greeks. In Physics and Philosophy he describes the probability wave of quantum theory as a tendency for something to happen, a quantitative version of the old idea of potentia in Aristotle: something standing between the idea of an event and the event itself, a strange kind of reality between possibility and actuality. He saw in modern physics a return to Heraclitus, with energy in the place of fire, the substance of which all particles are made and the cause of all change; and he held that the elementary particles are at bottom mathematical forms, nearer to the symmetries of Plato's Timaeus than to the hard atoms of Democritus.

Pauli and the archetypes

Wolfgang Pauli held that the ideas of science do not come from observation alone. Between the impressions of the senses and the concepts of a theory, he argued, stand ordering images in the soul, archetypes in Jung's sense, which the scientist feels before he can state them. He showed it in Johannes Kepler, whose astronomy grew from an image of God as Trinity: the centre the Father, the outer surface the Son, and the equal relation between centre and surface the Spirit. Kepler's search for the harmonies of the planets was a search for that image in the heavens.

Pauli set beside Kepler his opponent Robert Fludd, a Rosicrucian physician who thought in fours where Kepler thought in threes, and who distrusted measurement because it divided the living whole. Pauli recognised both men in himself: the one who measures and the one who seeks the whole. His own hope was for a time when physics and psyche would be seen as complementary aspects of one reality.

Bohm: the implicate order

David Bohm proposed that the separate things of experience are unfolded from an order in which everything is enfolded in everything. He illustrated it with a device. Put a drop of ink in glycerine between two glass cylinders and turn the outer one: the drop is drawn out into a thread so fine that it vanishes. Turn the cylinder back, and the drop appears again. It was never destroyed, only enfolded. The visible drop belongs to what Bohm calls the explicate order, and the enfolded state to the implicate.

A hologram gives a second image of the same idea, since every part of the plate holds information about the whole scene. Reality, for Bohm, is an undivided, flowing whole, which he calls the holomovement, and things are relatively stable forms within it, as a vortex is a form within a stream. The habit of thought that cuts the world into separate pieces, useful for practical life, does harm when it is taken for the way things are, and he traced much human conflict to it.

Bohm: thought as a system

In his later years Bohm taught that thought is not a neutral tool but a system, one that produces results and then denies producing them, as when an assumption creates a conflict and the conflict is blamed on others. His remedy was dialogue: a group meeting without an agenda, in which each person suspends their assumptions, holding them up to be seen rather than defending or acting on them, so that the group can watch thought at work. Many of these ideas grew from his long conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti, among them their talks on the ending of psychological time.

Einstein: the cosmic religious feeling

Albert Einstein rejected a personal God who rewards and punishes, and described instead what he called the cosmic religious feeling: awe before the order and harmony of nature, which he held to be the strongest and noblest motive for scientific work. Asked what he believed, he answered that he believed in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, and not in a God concerned with the fates and doings of human beings. Science without religion, he wrote, is lame, and religion without science is blind.