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Now: Physics – Word Existing Beyond Time

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Here. Now. Nowhere. Always.

I have always been drawn to the insight that appears when two very different ways of seeing the world overlap. Physics asks how things work. Philosophy and religion ask why there is anything here at all, and whether existence has purpose. Can one inform the other at the intersection?

For me, one of those meeting points has always been quantum mechanics. When I first encountered it, I was especially struck by the Planck scale: the scale at which our familiar concepts of space, time, and measurement begin to fail, and where our present theories no longer provide a complete description. It seemed to suggest not just a technical limit, but something almost spiritual: a boundary beyond which we are not permitted to see clearly.

Planck and the Discovery of a Granular World

Max Planck’s work at the turn of the twentieth century began with a practical problem: how matter emits light as it heats up. A poker in a fire starts black, then glows red, then yellow, then white. Classical physics could not fully explain this. Planck’s great step was to propose that energy is not emitted continuously, but in discrete packets: quanta.

This gave us the Planck constant, usually written as h, and with it the beginning of quantum mechanics. Light, which behaves as a wave, also arrives in packets we call photons. Already, reality had begun to look less smooth and more “bitty” than common sense had assumed.

Planck’s constant can also be combined with the speed of light and Newton’s gravitational constant to give the Planck length: an unimaginably tiny scale below which we can not know. It is not simply a smaller ruler. It points towards a frontier where our present theories cease to give a complete description.

The Limit of Seeing

That frontier has always seemed significant to me. In this life, we are not allowed to know everything. Our senses, instruments, and theories take us a long way, but not all the way. Beyond a certain point we move from measurement into trust, imagination, instinct, and belief.

The biblical story of Thomas captures this human limitation. Thomas wants contact, proof, the physical placing of a hand into the wound of Christ. He is not mocked for wanting evidence; he is human. But the story also suggests that there are truths which cannot be reached by evidence alone. The Planck scale has always felt to me like a scientific echo of that same boundary: a smallness beneath which our usual ways of knowing dissolve.

Tim Palmer and Rational Quantum Mechanics

More than a century after Planck, in fact only last year, Tim Palmer at Oxford proposed an intriguing development called Rational Quantum Mechanics, or RaQM. The idea is not that quantum mechanics has failed. On the contrary, quantum theory remains astonishingly successful. Palmer’s question is whether some of its mysteries arise not from nature itself, but from the mathematics we use to describe nature.

Standard quantum mechanics relies heavily on the continuum of real and complex numbers.* Palmer asks whether physical reality may instead be constrained by rational numbers: numbers expressible as ratios of whole numbers. One half and one third are rational. Numbers like pi are not.

A simple picture helps. Imagine a perfectly smooth dial: you could turn it to any position whatsoever. Now imagine a dial with tiny clicks or cogs: it can still point in many directions, but only to permitted positions. If Palmer is right, then at the deepest mathematical level the universe may be more like the second dial than the first. It is not smooth all the way down. It is granular.

Einstein, Randomness, and the Search for Order

This matters because quantum mechanics is often taken to imply that randomness is woven into the fabric of reality. Particles appear not to have definite properties until measured, and events at the smallest scale seem governed by probability rather than certainty.

Einstein was never comfortable with that conclusion. His famous remark that “God does not play dice” was not merely a religious aside. It expressed a deep conviction that the world should be intelligible, lawful, and ordered beneath its apparent strangeness. This was, after all, broadly consonant with Newton’s view. There is a purpose behind this material world.

RaQM can be read as a possible ally of that instinct. It does not pretend that quantum experiments are simple or ordinary. Rather, it suggests that what looks like randomness may arise from our limited access to a deeper mathematical structure. Chance, in this view, may be perspectival: real to us because our view is partial, but not ultimate in the structure itself.

The Block Universe and the View from Outside Time

Einstein’s relativity also changed the way we think about time. In the block universe view, past, present, and future are not separate realms, with only the present being truly real. They are different locations within one four-dimensional spacetime. What we call “now” is the point from which we experience the whole.

From inside time, events unfold. We decide, wait, regret, hope, and wonder. But viewed as a completed whole, reality may be more like a vast structure in which every event has its place. This does not make ordinary experience meaningless. It simply reminds us that our experience may be a local view of something much larger.

Aquinas and the Question of Why

This is where the 13th-century Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas becomes relevant. Aquinas was not offering a primitive substitute for physics. He was asking a different question. Science can describe how things behave within the universe. Aquinas asks why there is an intelligible universe at all.

For Aquinas, God is not one cause among other causes. God is not another object inside the cosmos, competing with gravity, quantum fields, or mathematics. God is the ground of being itself: the reason why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is ordered enough to be known. In a deep sense, Aquinas was expressing something that later resonates with Einstein’s conception of spacetime.

That distinction matters. Physics answers questions of mechanism. Theology, at its best, asks questions of existence, intelligibility, and final meaning. The two need not be enemies, provided we do not force either to answer the wrong kind of question.

A Universe Made as One Thing?

Put together, these ideas suggest a powerful possibility. Planck points us towards a limit of measurement. Palmer suggests that the mathematics of the quantum world may be discrete rather than continuous. Einstein urges us not to surrender too quickly to ultimate randomness. The block universe offers a picture of reality as a completed whole. Aquinas asks why such a whole should exist, and why it should be intelligible to minds like ours.

None of this proves God in any crude or mechanical sense. It does something subtler and, to my mind, more interesting. It shows that modern physics has not made the old philosophical questions disappear. Instead, it has sharpened them. If reality is not finally chaotic but ordered; if time may be part of a larger completed structure; if the deepest laws of nature are mathematical and intelligible, then the ancient idea of a rational Logos begins to look less like an outdated metaphor and more like a profound way of naming the mystery. The English Book of Common Prayer refers to God as “the Word existing beyond (space and) time.”

Perhaps randomness is not the last word. Perhaps it is what order looks like when seen from inside the world, through finite minds, finite instruments, and finite time. The deeper question remains: why should there be an ordered reality at all, and why should we be capable of glimpsing it?

 

*Integers are whole numbers, including zero and negative values, while rational numbers are exact fractions made from those integers. Irrational numbers are real values that cannot be expressed as fractions because their decimals continue infinitely without repeating. Together, rational and irrational numbers form the continuous one-dimensional line of real numbers. Complex numbers extend this continuum into a two-dimensional plane by incorporating an imaginary unit.

World. Combining physics and psychics

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This is a story about the meeting of minds between Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. Their insight was that reality is explained both by physics and psychics.

Pauli was – with Bohr, Planck, Heinsenberg, Dirac et al – a pioneer of quantum mechanics and Nobel Prize winner for Physics for discovery of the exclusion principle. He could equally have won the prize for his discovery of the Neutrino or of PCT Symmetry.

He is less known for his work on the philosophy of knowledge and for his work with Carl Jung on the links between physics and the psyche. They wrote papers together (in some of which Einstein participated) , which were only discovered and published in the 1970’s and also co-authored the book “The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche”.

In 1955 he gave a lecture at the University of Hamburg, “Science and Western Thought”, which he later described in analysis to Jung and to Niels Bohr. His interest throughout his life was to reconcile the “rational-critical” (Western Science) with the “mystical-irrational” (Eastern thought), to try to create a single framework of the physical and psychical.

“it is precisely by these means, that the scientist can more or less consciously tread a path of inner salvation. Slowly then develop inner images, fantasies or ideas, compensatory to the external situation”.

His belief in complementarity was fundamental; not just in physics but in general. For him and Jung the conscious and unconscious are mirrors of each other, and an understanding built solely out of one or the other is necessarily incomplete. (What Pauli sometimes referred to – witheringly – as “not even wrong”). This extended to his views on wider existence. He had an abiding interest in the views of Kepler and Newton – scientists working out of the alchemy tradition – “as above, so below” whose physical discoveries were incidental (to them) in their pursuit of the truth of God.

Pauli, with many great creative scientists, was a polymath. His scientific credentials are impeccable. His god-father was Ernst Mach and he was mentored by Arnold Sommerfeld. Albert Einstein proposed him for his Nobel Prize. He was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Bohr, Heisenberg and Dirac. All of his inquiring brought him to a concrete sense of the motive force and nature that lies beyond the physical or material world. He had a strong sense of humanity and humour, dealing gently with those of other or non-belief. For instance in response to Paul Dirac (who famously could not tolerate the religions and their politics) he quipped – “Well, I’d say that also our friend Dirac has got a religion and the first commandment of this religion is ‘God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet'”.

Here he is on the nature of knowledge itself:

“the natural laws are of such a kind that every bit of knowledge gained from a measurement must be paid for by the loss of other, complementary items of knowledge.. the process of knowing is connected with the religious experience of transmutation undergone by him who acquires knowledge. This connection can only be comprehended through symbols which both imaginatively express the emotional aspect of the experience and stand in vital relationship to the sum total of contemporary knowledge and the actual process of cognition. Just because in our times the possibility of such symbolism has become an alien idea, it may be considered especially interesting to examine another age to which the concepts of what is now called classical scientific mechanics were foreign but which permits us to prove the existence of a symbol that had, simultaneously, a religious and a scientific function.”

Walter Heisenberg wrote of Pauli’s beliefs (in his book – “Across the Frontiers”)

“Pauli.. points out that even Kepler’s conversion to the Copernican theory, which marks the beginning of modern natural science, was decisively affected by certain primeval images or archetypes. He cites this passage from Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum: “The image of the triune God is in the sphere, namely of the Father in the centre, of the Son in the outer surface and of the Holy Ghost in the uniformity of connection between point and intervening space or surroundings”.

Continuing to:

“Pauli considers, moreover, that Kepler’s symbol illustrates quite generally the attitude from which contemporary science has arisen. “From an inner centre, the mind seems to move outward in a sort of extraversion into the physical world, in which all happenings are assumed to be automatic, so that the spirit serenely encompasses this physical world , as it were, with its Ideas.” Thus the natural science of the modern era involves a Christian elaboration of the “lucid mysticism” of Plato, in which the unitary ground of spirit and matter is sought in the primeval images, and in which understanding has found its place in its various degrees and kinds, even to knowledge of the word of God.”

Max Planck, the Constant Believer

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“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck was the originator of Quantum Mechanics, and gives his name to the Planck Constant, relating energy to frequency and to the Planck Length – the smallest measure of length, below which nothing is knowable. He was a committed Lutheran; like many great scientists, one who questioned the nature of God’s knowability – but not God’s existence. “I am a deeply religious man, but that does not necessarily mean that I believe in a Christian God or even a personal God”.

He took issue with Pauli, Heisenberg and Bohr on their “Copenhagen Interpretation” of the results of quantum mechanical experiments – holding that eventually all matter would be found simply to be wave form. Odd, of course – given that it was his work that showed that photons behave as packets or quanta (it had much earlier been shown that light behaves as a wave). He eventually was proved wrong and the duality of existence at the fundamental level – both material and immaterial has now been proved.

He held that science was capable of answering only so much:

“Religion belongs to that realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and, therefore closed to science”.

And again:

“We might naturally assume that one of the achievements of science would have been to restrict belief in miracle. But it does not seem to do so.”

He most certainly would not have tolerated the current lazy assumption that in some way science and religion are incompatible or opposed to each other:

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls”.

And:

“the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, … eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge. It is the steady, ongoing, never-slackening fight against scepticism and dogmatism, which religion and science wage together . The directing watchword in this struggle runs from the remotest past to the distant future: ‘On to God’”.

Einstein and Religion

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“Scientists are likely to be atheists.”

This is a new-age myth that materialists attempt to foster. It is not based in truth. Indeed many surveys have shown that a greater proportion of scientists believe in God, personal or otherwise, than do the general population.

I want to work through the writings on the subject of some real scientific heros – Neils Bohr, Max Planck, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg and the man who got me started – with his work with Karl Jung – Wolfgang Pauli.

But, to start. What did Albert Einstein really think? (Apart from “God doesn’t play dice”).

He spoke often about the relation – and complementarity – of religion and science. His view was, of course, often canvassed. He set down his thoughts most extensively in “Ideas and Opinions” (1954) and ” The World As I See It” (1949).

Einstein was most definitely not a materialist, and considered  “true” science and “true” religion to be complementary.

“The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked. While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to who we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge”.

He did not adhere to any one religion. In his earlier writing he categorises his view of a kind of “progression” of religious thought from a “religion of fear” through to “moral religions” and finally a “cosmic religious feeling” – which he finds in:

“many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image”

 

He also admired particularly the writing and thinking of Francis of Assisi and Spinoza, together with the “Jewish-Christian” tradition.

“The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations”

Einstein did not think of religion and science as being in conflict – except where one sought to make statements related to the sphere of the other. This, applies both ways. He identified that each validly approached a different question.

“the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be..Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.. mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends”.

Einstein did not in the end believe in an anthropomorphic God – made in man’s image, but he certainly believed in something beyond the material and knowable.

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in the alone, I am a deeply religious man”.