I wonder a lot about the fine line between genius and insanity. Today we think of science as the polar opposite of mysticism and the esoteric, but this is a relatively modern distinction. If you look further into the past, there was almost no distinction between these categories. Many of the greatest minds in human history would be considered insane crackpots today if it weren't for the remarkable success of their theories of reality. Modern scientists will extoll the brilliance of Newton in PBS documentaries but carefully sidestep any mentions of his vast mystical works and influences.
Over the years I've collected quotes and stories about some of these hidden influences on the great scientists of the past and have shared them here.
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles 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, The New Science
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Max Planck, The Observer (January 25, 1931)
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, The Nature of Matter, speech at Florence, Italy (1944)
For us believing physicists, the separation between past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.
Albert Einstein, Letter to Michele Angelo Besso (March 21, 1955)
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest...a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein, Letter to Robert S. Marcus (1950)
It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be "psychic" nor "physical" but somehow both and somehow neither.
Wolfgang Pauli, Letter to Abraham Pais
In the new pattern of thought we do not assume any longer the detached observer, occurring in the idealizations of this classical type of theory, but an observer who by his indeterminable effects creates a new situation, theoretically described as a new state of the observed system.
Wolfgang Pauli, Man's Right to Knowledge (1954)
It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.
Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question (1961)
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958)
The discontinuous change in the wave function takes place with the act of registration of the result by the mind of the observer. It is this discontinuous change of our knowledge in the instant of registration that has its image in the discontinuous change of the probability function.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958)
Thought and matter have a great similarity of order. In a way, nature is alive, as Whitehead would say, all the way to the depths. And intelligent. Thus it is both mental and material, as we are.
David Bohm, 1982 Interview in the Journal ReVision
Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”
Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.
Modern quantum theory, the overarching principles of twentieth century physics, leads to quite a different view of reality, a view that man, or intelligent life, or communicating observer participator are the whole means by which the very universe is created: without them, nothing.
John Wheeler, The Anthropic Universe (February 18, 2006)
As regards mind, I am fully convinced that it has a central place in the ultimate nature of reality.
John Stewart Bell, What Does Quantum Mechanics Say About Mind Powers? - Psychology Today
Any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected. Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation. After all, the concept of observation is in so far arbitrary as it depends upon which objects are included in the system to be observed.
Niels Bohr, The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory (1928)
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil.
Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1929)
Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it.
Pascual Jordon, Physics and the Secret of Organic Life (1934)
We must say that [the collapse] is applied only when the observer himself perceives the measurement result... The boundary between the two can be pushed arbitrarily deeply into the interior of the actual observer... But this does not change the fact that in each case the boundary between the system to be observed and the observer’s eye must be placed somewhere, and that the measurement is not completed until it has been made into the content of a subjective perception.
John Von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932)
Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture because it itself is the world-picture.
Erwin Schrodinger, My View of the World (1961)
The only possible inference ... is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' -am the person, if any, controls the 'motion of the atoms'. ...The personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self... There is only one thing, and even in that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life (1944)
I have...no hesitation in declaring quite bluntly that the acceptance of a really existing material world, as the explanation of the fact that we all find in the end that we are empirically in the same environment, is mystical and metaphysical.
Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (1958)
We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe.
John Archibald Wheeler, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (2001)
It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question (1961)
The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Martin Rhees, Just Six Numbers (1999)
In short, I had begun to think that consciousness is really nothing more than simple existence. By way of leading up to this, I asked Gödel if he believed there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world. He replied that, yes, the Mind is the thing that is structured, but that the Mind exists independently of its individual properties. I then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people. Gödel replied, “Of course. This is the basic mystic teaching.” We talked a little set theory, and then I asked him my last question: “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?” Gödel spoke not directly to this question, but to the question of what my question meant — that is, why anyone would even believe that there is a perceived passage of time at all. He went on to relate the getting rid of belief in the passage of time to the struggle to experience the One Mind of mysticism. Finally he said this: “The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.
Rudy Rucker, Memories of Kurt Godel
In 1886, while visiting Boston on a speaking tour, Alfred Russell Wallace was taken by William James to a séance where several apparitions were expected to materialize. Wallace was not the only famous individual in England who was attracted by the lure of ghosts, but his passionate embrace of spiritualism may have been the strangest considering his career as a naturalist. The phenomena of spiritualism are related to the spirits' efforts to draw attention and to communicate and to the methods of the mediums for receiving information. They include raps and other noises, apports and the manipulation of objects, automatic writing, psychic photography, touching, appearances, and clairvoyance or clairaudience. Wallace's fascination with the occult was probably a result of an aversion he shared with Charles Darwin toward the dominant forms of Christianity. His inherent sense of justice and his appreciation of the uniquely human potential of mind and spirit led him away from evolution and Christian ethics alike and toward the third path of spiritual evolution as described by the spiritualist movement.
One interesting chapter describes the psychic research the Curies underwent with the famed Italian medium Eusapio Palladino, who would perform séances with Pierre and Marie Curie. Pierre afterward would take notes describing levitating tables and mysterious music heard in the distance.
4. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.
5. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.
13. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.
14. Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.Kurt Godel, Godel's Ontological Proof (1941)
I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
The climax of his work came during a bout of malarial fever when Wallace, delirious and confined to bed, suddenly saw how a variety might become a new species, were it better placed to survive the incessant destruction of the natural world.
Quote describing Alfred Russel Wallace's insight for evolution, What prompted Charles Darwin to publish his theory of evolution?
Kekulé published the theory of the structure of benzene in January of 1865.[20] The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper. Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros)
Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring, Wikipedia - August Kekule
I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.
There are many legends about Seymour Cray. John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.
He also describes encounters with a deity named Flora, who imparts revelations but also cruelly tests his faith. Although the content of the letter is baffling, the way it is written is perfectly lucid. Three months later Grothendieck sent a "correction", stating that he was no longer certain of the truth of the revelations described in iLa Lettre de la Bonne Nouvelle". He writes: "That I was the victim of a mystification by one of more 'spirits' (among which my limited capacity could not distinguish), invested with prodigious powers over my body and in my psyche, I no longer have the least doubt." Together, the two letters impart an impression of deep disturbance and suffering.
As If Summoned From the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck
Ramanujan openly stated that he received the mathematical inspiration and sometimes whole formulas, through contacting the Hindu Goddess Namagiri while dreaming
...
“While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”
Thereupon, doubting whether he dreamed or meditated, he awoke without emotion, and continued, with open eyes, the interpretation of his dream on the same idea. By the poets gathered in the collection he understood revelation and enthusiasm, of which he did not despair to see himself favored. By the piece of verse Est et Non, which is the Yes and No of Pythagoras [in margin: nai kai ou], he understood truth and falsity in the human knowledges [connaissances] and the profane sciences. Seeing that the application of all these things succeeded so well to his taste, he was so bold as to persuade himself that it was the Spirit of Truth who had sought to open to him the treasures of all the sciences by this dream.
© 2025 labyrinths