Big name physicists and astronomers gave us amazing revelations, which sometimes spun off profound takeaways in philosophy, metaphysics, and everyday existence. So let’s briefly look past the science to see how we may be influenced by these great minds.
• Werner Heisenberg: One of the founders of quantum theory and creator of the Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg, together with Erwin Schrodinger, came to believe that consciousness is a basic facet of the universe, and showed that nothing is real until it is observed. Moreover, it’s not energy fields or insentient globs of matter like electrons that underlies the cosmos, he said, but awareness itself. And that, moreover, consciousness is fundamental. Which means it doesn’t come and go, but eternally remains, independent of transient animal bodies. Takeaway? You’ll never experience any cessation of consciousness; it will continue as an unbroken parade of experiences. These great theorists thus questioned the reality of death.
• Carl Sagan: This author and TV science astronomer actively worked on the puzzle of extraterrestrial life. He popularized his Cornell colleague Frank Drake’s famous equation that attempted to quantify how many intelligent communicating civilizations may exist in our galaxy. Unfortunately, the equation’s elements required guessing about such items as the percentage of planets with life and the fraction of those that might develop interplanetary communication. The unhelpful result was that the Milky Way may have anywhere from one such civilization to several million. Moreover.
• After Enrico Fermi made fundamental breakthroughs in atomic energy and heard scientists discuss the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, he famously retorted, “Then where are they?” His pessimistic inference, based on the absence of any contact from putative aliens, when combined with Sagan’s later conclusion that there may be no more than one communicative civilization in the entire galaxy, changed the popular assumption that Earth has neighbors. This promulgated a widespread acceptance of vast cosmic isolation.
• Albert Einstein: He showed in both his 1905 and 1915 relativity theories that time doesn’t exist. At least, not as the stand-alone entity we usually imagine, but merely as a part of spacetime, a multidimensional gridlike matrix in which everything is embedded. He also often expressed certainty that free will is an illusion, and considered it a guiding principle in his life, saying it made him more forgiving of himself and others. If Einstein was right, we can each profoundly relax, realizing our brains are automatically making all decisions with no need for the slightest effort or second guessing
• Neils Bohrs and Albert Einstein: Their quantum mechanics and relativity theories disagreed about whether light-speed constrains everything in the universe. Despite Einstein being correct that neither light nor gravity can propagate faster than 186,282.4 miles per second, the confirmation of particle entanglement proved that certain objects can change a distant body instantaneously. On some level, everything in the universe is therefore in ‘contact’ with every other, with no absolute separations in space or time. Takeaway: The universe definitely seems to be a single oneness (or possibly a conscious Being), as opposed to the longheld model of the cosmos as the sum of its disparate components.
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