Back to: The Hermetic Laws & Quantum Physics
Bridge to Module 1
We have spent Module 0 establishing the ground. You now have a working grasp of what Hermeticism is and where it came from. You have a working grasp of the quantum revolution and the interpretive problem it bequeathed to us. You have the three-level correspondence framework, the two key fallacies to watch for, and the two interpretive principles that make honest inquiry possible. That is the kit.
Module 1 takes us into territory that could not be addressed properly until you had that kit in hand. We are going to look at the founders of quantum physics themselves and ask an honest historical question. To what extent did Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Bohm, and Wheeler actually draw on the wisdom traditions of the East and the Hermetic traditions of the West as they built modern physics? And what should we make of the convergence, if any, between the philosophical commitments of these physicists and the conclusions they reached in their physics? The historical record here is rich, it is surprising, and it has been both overstated and understated in popular literature. Applying the tools from Module 0 to this historical question will be genuinely demanding and genuinely rewarding.
Here is the question I want you to carry into Module 1. If the founders of quantum mechanics found parallels between what they were discovering in their laboratories and what the wisdom traditions had been saying for millennia, what does that mean? Does it mean the wisdom traditions had anticipated the physics? Or does it mean the founders projected their philosophical commitments onto ambiguous equations? Or, more interestingly, does it mean that the deep structure of reality admits of multiple routes of access, and that contemplation and experiment can converge on the same territory from different directions? Hold the question lightly. We will earn our answer slowly.
See you in Module 1.
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