Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists

American philosopher Ken Wilber has done a great service by bringing together in a single volume excerpts from the mystical writings of the world's greatest physicists. Six of the eight men included were Nobel laureates including Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Plank, de Broglie, and Pauli.These are the intellectual giants who gave us the twin pillars of modern physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, upon which all of contemporary science rests. Given the popular view that they must have been atheists it is astonishing to learn that all of them were quite explicit in expressing the need for a mystical outlook extending beyond the physical world.Let's be clear. Wilber as editor has not pulled a few paragraphs out of context. Erwin Schroedinger for example writes of "the mystic vision", De Broglie writes that "the mechanism demands a mysticism", and Wolfgang Pauli speaks of "embracing the rational and the mystical."None of these men were particularly 'religious' however. The popular religions of today (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.), may be viewed as specific theories of Ultimate Reality (this reviewer's characterization). They all make specific statements - some empirically testable, many others not - about people and events in the physical world and how these related to God, or Allah, or All That Is, or some similar term.Mysticism on the other hand is not a religion but a path to understanding. It has nothing to do with religious creeds or doctrines, or whether or not there is a personal God, and certainly nothing to do with science which is something else entirely. Mystics simply believe on the basis of personal experience that there is likely to exist another level or levels of consciousness beyond that of the five senses. Through rigorous mental practice they believe that it is possible to access wisdom and insight from that level which represents the highest or ultimate reality.Individual mystics may personally identify with one religion or another but the practice of mysticism as a path is found in all the major religions and is, in and of itself, areligious. This point is unfortunately muddied in Wilber's otherwise quite interesting introduction where he equates religion with spirituality (p.18), something most thoughtful people would probably strongly reject. One can be deeply spiritual without committing to any specific set of religious doctrines.Finally, I feel compelled comment on Wilber's assertion that the physicists would reject so called New Age books like "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters". The key argument of such books is less that physics "proves" Taoism or Buddhism or some other form of Eastern esoteric thought but rather that seemingly bizarre and unbelievable statements about the nature of space and time and reality made by practitioners of these traditions appear to be supported by the findings of modern physics. (Cf. for example G. Zukav, "Wu Li Masters", p. 256 and especially p. 331).For the last hundred years or so science and religion have declared a truce in their war for the allegiance of the mind of Man. Science would to stick to matters of the physical world while religion would stick to matters of the world beyond the senses. However as much as both sides, including Ken Wilber, would like to keep it that way, the march of scientific knowledge takes us ever forward toward a world view that challenges our most basic assumptions about the nature of human reality.I am speaking here specifically of entanglement, the now widely accepted principle in physics that particles really do influence each other without regard to distance or time, that is, they interact instantaneously even if they are separated by billions of light years. This was scientifically demonstrated in 1982, the year before Quantum Questions was originally released, and has been confirmed repeatedly since then. Even more disconcerting are recent experiments which seem to imply that actions in the present (as we perceive it) can actually alter events that have already been recorded in the past. (Cf. Amir D. Aczel, "Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics", 2003).However troubling such findings may be to our everyday conception of 'reality', they merely confirm Max Plank's famous statement that "those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."The shocks keep coming and they are getting stronger whether we like it or not. Will they lead to a total paradigm shift in our conception of reality?The deeper significance of this book is that it shows all scientists and those who someday will be scientists that being a mystic is okay. Want to argue with Heisenberg and Plank and Einstein and Schroedinger and....?

Spiritual truths aren't subject to testing using accepted methods of scientific measurement. See how succinctly this can be stated, and how self-evident it is?I nearly discarded this book after plowing through the introduction, which would have been a shame, for I may never have read any of the physicists' essays. Therein lies the value of this book. Wilber is way, way too into duality, and way, way into saying "look how smart I am."The physicists are capable of speaking for themselves, and you're capable of careful thought. So get a good used copy and have fun.Four days later:In fairness to Ken Wilber, he's just using his intellectual bent to gain understanding. I do it too. But reading and thinking can take you only so far. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and a model is only a model.Incidentally, the clearest, cleanest, least discursive and most easily grasped writing in this entire book is Albert Einstein's, of which there is an unfortunately small amount. I'm likely to seek out more. Oh my goodness, what a mind!

I was ready to hate this book, ready to do battle with another soft-headed New Ager who, in a mirror image of the lab coat creationists, wants to bend science to their will, to appropriate its authority to help sway, even coerce, for the sake of their grand cause. Was I surprised! Wilber's introduction is a pellucid repudiation of The Toa Of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Master and a devestating blow to the even less legitimate "What The Bleep Do We Know." Wilber even abandons his own earlier views on physics supporting his mysticism. Why? Because he read these founders of New Physics, and not one of them believed that their work supported it. And this wasn't out of their ignorance of Eastern thought. No, in fact, each of these great thinkers is well versed in mysticism and, ultimately, they are mystics themselves! Wilber makes it clear that (opposed to my belief that science can only become mysticism henchman if you lessen science) that only by lessening your mysticism can you claim it's proven in the lab. And pragmatically he argues that by hitching your mysticism to the science wagon, you are (as was the case with Capra) subject to the further results of experiments that might disprove your theory. Science is, after all: provisional, changing, abstract and only intelligible in the language of mathematics. Mysticism, on the other hand, is unmediated, absolute and ever-true. Not that Wilber walks away from his dialogue with these great scientists disillusioned. His Mysticism is firmly intact. He just admits that science is not the way to get there, except in the sense that a profound understanding of physics gives you a profound understanding of its limits, of its failure to address being as such. And it is this deep understanding that lead all these scientists to their mysticism. Science should be left to scientists and Religion to the religious. Why would you want to mix the two? Only if you want to coerce, only if you are too weak to look Shiva in the eyes. This book changed me, I hope you can read the introduction with an open mind.

I'm no scientist, but I love reading these types of books. This book is filled with English that you'll need a dictionary by your side to comprehend what the meanings are. I do not mind looking up words when I come across something I do not understand in a book, but I'm not fond of having to do it constantly. The book is very interesting, but not for the extreme novice or anyone who has a comprehension problem, or doesn't have the patience to have a dictionary by their side.

This book is a real "eye opener"....I had to re read certain parts several times over in order to understand..(I was never good at Maths!).....One can never think as before after reading this book! A whole new world! A new way of thinking...

This is a good resource of phycisist writings on the relationship of science and religion but it's not an easy read. I ended up dipping rather than reading from cover to cover. More suitable, in my opinion, for professional philosophers, theologians and scientists than the general reader.

This book changed my world-view. It redifined what physics is, and the people who redefined it were the 8 top physicists of the 20th century. If they don't know what they are talking about, we may as well all give up now.The book raises throws down a tantalising challenge to all interested in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. The excellent editor Wilber points out that, on the one hand, none of the 8 physicists felt quantum mechanics provided any proof, or EVIDENCE FOR, any mystical world view. On the other hand, all 8 physicists describe themselves as mystics! If this seeming paradox doesn't interest you, physics doesn't interest you.The answer, it turns out, lies less in the nature of mysticism than in the nature of physics. Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein et al have shattered my world view, and thanks to Wilber for bringing it to my attention.This is a book that deserves to be widely read. Which is a shame in my case as, before I finished it, I left it on the train. I hope someone else picked it up and got soemthing from it, then...

I can't attempt to review this book with the competence of a philosopher or physicist, and will just try briefly to describe my own reaction.Perhaps most of us suspect that there exists a spiritual substrate of some sort behind the world. Men like Shroedinger and Jeans go into the matter very articulately, if not even poetically. One of the questions asked at several points is the following: Why does the universe appear to conform so readily to mathematics? Russell dismissed this question by saying things would be much more mysterious if such conformity were absent, if e.g. rolled dice did not on average yield double sixes one twelfth of the time. The reader will have to decide for himself whether Russell was right in thus dismissing a question posed by thinkers of the top rank.For me the style of the Editor's comments is just a little cloying, but this is not a serious reservation. They nicely complement a most interesting selection of essays. I would recommend this book to anyone in sympathy with the fact that, as I understand it, the great physicists of the 20th century were of mystical inclination.

Very good