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Back to: The Hermetic Laws & Quantum Physics
The Physicists Who Looked East (and West)
We begin with the record. Not with speculation, not with the retellings of later enthusiasts, but with what these men wrote and said about the wisdom traditions. Each of the figures below has a documented engagement with philosophy, contemplation, or religious thought outside the narrow stream of Western scientific materialism. Some of those engagements changed their physics. Some came after the physics was already done. All of them are part of the actual history, and all of them are worth reading carefully.
Niels Bohr and the Principle of Complementarity
Niels Bohr was the most important single architect of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He was also a man who thought carefully and publicly about the philosophical implications of what quantum theory was telling us about reality. His central philosophical contribution was the principle of complementarity. The idea that a quantum system can have properties that are meaningful only in pairs, where the measurement of one member of the pair necessarily precludes the simultaneous measurement of the other, and where both are required for a complete description.
Position and momentum are the classic example. You cannot measure both with arbitrary precision at the same time, not because your instruments are limited, but because the quantum system does not possess both as simultaneously definite properties. Wave and particle behavior is another example. A photon or an electron can show wave behavior in one experimental arrangement and particle behavior in another, but no single experiment shows both at once. The two descriptions are not contradictory. They are complementary.
In 1947, when King Frederik IX of Denmark conferred the Order of the Elephant on Bohr, Bohr was required, as a knight of the order, to design his own coat of arms. He placed the Taoist taijitu at the center and wrote around it the Latin motto contraria sunt complementa, “opposites are complementary.” The coat of arms can still be seen at Frederiksborg Castle, and a version of it is carved into Bohr’s bust at the University of Copenhagen.
Here is the honest question. Did Bohr develop complementarity because he was studying Taoism, or did he reach for the yin-yang symbol after the fact because it captured what he had already discovered? The documentary evidence points firmly toward the second answer. Bohr developed complementarity between 1927 and 1928, presenting the first systematic version at the Como Conference in September 1927. His interest in Taoist thought, while real, came later, reinforced by his 1937 visit to China and his reading of Eastern philosophy in the years that followed. The coat of arms in 1947 is not the origin of his thinking. It is his mature recognition that what he had found in the laboratory resembled, in its deep structure, what the Taoists had been saying for two millennia.
That is still something remarkable. The man did not need the Taoist symbol to make the physics work. He chose it because, looking back over his life’s work, it was the most honest summary he could give. That is a different kind of influence than direct borrowing. It is what Module 0 called Level 2, deep analogy, with the possibility of something approaching Level 1 in the mature formulation. We will return to this.
Werner Heisenberg and His Conversations with Tagore
Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle in 1927, at the age of twenty-five. It is, along with the Schrödinger equation and the Born probability rule, one of the three legs on which all of quantum mechanics stands. The uncertainty principle says that certain pairs of physical quantities, such as position and momentum, cannot be precisely determined at the same time, not as a matter of instrumental limitation but as a fundamental feature of how nature works.
Two years later, in October 1929, Heisenberg traveled to India as part of a world lecture tour. On October 4 of that year he visited the University of Calcutta in the morning and in the afternoon he was taken by the Indian physicist Debendra Mohan Bose, nephew of Jagadish Chandra Bose, to the home of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate in literature and one of the great philosophical voices of modern India. Heisenberg and Tagore spent a long afternoon talking about science and Indian philosophy.
The details of this visit are documented in Helmut Rechenberg’s meticulous biography of Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg — Die Sprache der Atome, and in the account Heisenberg himself gave to Fritjof Capra in 1972, published in Capra’s 1988 book Uncommon Wisdom. In his own words, Heisenberg told Capra that the Indian conversations had brought him “great comfort.” He said that ideas of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence, which had been so disturbing in the context of European physics, turned out to be central and familiar in the Indian tradition. “After these conversations with Tagore,” Heisenberg said, “some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.”
The crucial point, and one that popular accounts frequently get wrong, is the timing. Heisenberg proposed the uncertainty principle in 1927. He met Tagore in 1929. The Indian conversations did not give him uncertainty. What they gave him was a philosophical framework in which uncertainty, once discovered, no longer felt like a violation of how the world ought to be. They offered intellectual companionship for a worldview that, in the European context, still felt isolating and strange.
This is an important distinction. It is not the same as “Heisenberg got his physics from the Vedas,” a claim that has been made in political contexts and is not supported by the historical record. What is supported, and what matters for us, is that one of the key founders of quantum mechanics found in the Indian wisdom tradition a philosophical home that Western materialism did not offer. He later wrote to Capra, in a letter dated July 9, 1971, that “the kinship between the ancient Eastern teachings and the philosophical consequences of the modern quantum theory have fascinated me again and again.” That is not discovery language. It is recognition language. The physics and the philosophy arrived by different routes at a similar view of reality, and Heisenberg, across a long life, kept noticing the fact.
Erwin Schrödinger and the Vedantic Vision
Of all the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger is the one whose engagement with Eastern philosophy went deepest. Schrödinger formulated the wave equation that bears his name in 1925 and 1926, work for which he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Paul Dirac. The equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system evolves over time. It is, along with Heisenberg’s matrix formulation and their subsequent unification, the mathematical core of quantum mechanics.
What is less well known is that Schrödinger had been reading the Upanishads since his student years. His biographer Walter Moore documents that by 1918, at age thirty-one and years before the wave equation, Schrödinger was writing personal notes on Advaita Vedanta, the school of Indian philosophy that teaches the ultimate non-duality of Atman (the individual self) and Brahman (the universal reality). In the autumn of 1925, the same year he was working out the wave mechanics, Schrödinger drafted a personal philosophical essay he called Mein Weltansicht, My View of the World. He set it aside for decades and completed it in 1960, three years before his death.
Chapter Five of that book is a sustained engagement with the Vedantic doctrine of the unity of consciousness. In it, Schrödinger wrote that “Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.” He traced the identity of Atman and Brahman, argued that the apparent plurality of consciousnesses is a kind of illusion, and suggested that this ancient insight was, in his view, the most promising resolution available to certain paradoxes thrown up by modern physics.
In a separate essay, Schrödinger wrote something even more striking. “Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world.” He did not think the singularity of consciousness could be proved by argument. He thought it had to be recognized by a direct kind of seeing, what the Upanishadic tradition called darshan, and he credited that tradition with having articulated the insight more clearly than any Western source available to him.
Now, here is the honest picture. Schrödinger’s wave equation did not come from the Upanishads. It came from the mathematics of wave propagation, from de Broglie’s earlier hypothesis that matter has a wave nature, and from Schrödinger’s own exceptional mathematical gift. But Schrödinger’s willingness to take the wave equation as a description of something real, his willingness to entertain the idea that consciousness might be genuinely fundamental to the physical picture, and his refusal to retreat into pure operationalism, all of that was nourished by his decades of reading in Vedanta. The physics and the philosophy were two streams feeding the same man, and he let them inform each other without ever confusing them. That is a harder discipline than it sounds. Schrödinger is one of the great examples of it.
Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and the Dual-Aspect Monism
Wolfgang Pauli was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. He formulated the Pauli exclusion principle in 1925, for which he received the 1945 Nobel Prize. He predicted the existence of the neutrino in 1930. He was famously acerbic, a demanding critic of sloppy thinking, and known among his colleagues as “the conscience of physics.” He was also, for most of his adult life, a man in deep dialogue with the depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung about the relationship between mind and matter.
The partnership began in 1931, when Pauli sought Jung’s help during a personal crisis following the death of his mother and the breakdown of his first marriage. Over the next twenty-five years the two men exchanged more than eighty letters and developed together what is now called the Pauli-Jung conjecture, or dual-aspect monism. The philosopher of science Harald Atmanspacher has documented this collaboration in detail.
The dual-aspect monism says roughly this. The mental and the physical are not two separate substances, as Cartesian dualism holds. Nor is one reducible to the other, as materialism and idealism respectively hold. Instead, the mental and the physical are two complementary aspects of a single underlying reality, which Pauli and Jung, borrowing from medieval alchemical and Hermetic sources, called the unus mundus, the “one world.” The mental and the physical both arise from the unus mundus as epistemic splits, meaning as two ways of knowing it, not as two separate things.
This is not a fringe speculation. It is a serious philosophical position with roots in Spinoza and Leibniz, and it continues to be defended today by philosophers of mind such as Harald Atmanspacher, Paavo Pylkkänen, and others. What makes Pauli’s engagement distinctive is that he tried to ground it in the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics itself, using the concept of complementarity that his colleague Bohr had developed. In Pauli’s extension, complementarity is not just a principle of physics. It is a principle that reaches across the mind-matter boundary.
Pauli also developed, with Jung, the concept of synchronicity, the idea that some coincidences between inner and outer events are not causally connected but are meaningfully connected through the unus mundus. Jung published the main essay on synchronicity in 1952, paired with an essay by Pauli on the influence of archetypal ideas on Kepler. The whole collaboration is recounted at length in Arthur I. Miller’s 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession, which is on the reading list for this module.
There is a story that has become part of Pauli’s legend. In December 1958, Pauli was admitted to a Zurich hospital with pancreatic cancer. When he arrived at his room and asked for the number, the nurse told him it was room 137. Pauli is reported to have said, “I will not leave this room alive.” One hundred and thirty-seven is the approximate reciprocal of the fine-structure constant, a dimensionless number in physics that had fascinated Pauli his whole life and that he believed held some deep key to the structure of reality. He died in that room a few days later. Make of that what you will. Pauli would have said it was a synchronicity. Many of his colleagues, despite themselves, found they could not quite dismiss it either.
David Bohm, Krishnamurti, and the Implicate Order
David Bohm is the bridge figure between the founding generation and our own. He studied at Berkeley, worked on the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer (though he was excluded from the bomb project itself due to his politics), wrote a well-regarded textbook on quantum theory in 1951 that so clarified the Copenhagen interpretation that Einstein invited him to Princeton to discuss it, and then, partly because of those conversations with Einstein, spent the rest of his life developing an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics that preserved realism and wholeness at the expense of locality.
Bohm’s physics is summarized in two books. Quantum Theory (1951) is the textbook. Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) is the philosophical masterwork. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm argues that the universe is a single, undivided whole, and that the apparent separateness of things is a surface manifestation of a deeper, folded-up order, which he called the implicate order. What we see, the world of tables and chairs and particles, is the explicate order, the unfolding of the implicate. Reality is not a collection of objects; it is an ongoing movement of enfolding and unfolding. He called this underlying dynamism the holomovement.
Bohm developed this picture partly from the mathematics of his own “hidden variable” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was first presented in 1952 as an alternative to Copenhagen, and partly from three decades of conversation with the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. The two men met in 1961, when Bohm was teaching at Birkbeck College in London and attended a Krishnamurti talk. They became friends and intellectual partners almost immediately, and their recorded conversations, collected in books such as The Ending of Time (1985) and The Limits of Thought, constitute one of the most sustained dialogues between a twentieth-century physicist and a contemporary spiritual teacher that we possess.
What did Bohm take from Krishnamurti? Primarily, a way of seeing the activity of thought itself. Krishnamurti held that much of human suffering comes from the fragmentation produced by thought, which breaks up the living wholeness of reality into static, separated pieces. Bohm recognized in this an almost exact description of what he believed was happening in physics. Newtonian and Cartesian thinking fragments the world into separate objects and laws, which is useful at the everyday scale but which obscures the deeper implicate order where everything is connected to everything else. Bohm came to believe that the same fragmentation of thought that produced Newtonian mechanics was producing war, environmental destruction, and psychological suffering, and that healing required a different quality of attention, what Krishnamurti called “choiceless awareness.”
This is where a careful reader has to pay attention. Bohm did not borrow his implicate order from Krishnamurti. He developed it from the mathematics of quantum mechanics, from relativity, and from his own philosophical reflection on wholeness. What Krishnamurti gave him was a way of living inside a wholeness-oriented picture of reality, and a vocabulary for describing the role of thought in generating the illusion of separation. The partnership between physics and contemplation here is unusually close, and it is unusually well documented. The Bohm-Krishnamurti dialogues are still being studied, and for good reason. They are the clearest case in the modern record of a practicing physicist and a contemplative teacher taking each other completely seriously over a long period of time.
John Archibald Wheeler and the Participatory Universe
John Archibald Wheeler was Einstein’s colleague at Princeton, a collaborator with Bohr on the first quantum-mechanical explanation of nuclear fission in 1939, the man who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” and the doctoral advisor of Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne. He was a physicist of the highest technical accomplishment. He was also, by his own account, a man who thought the philosophical implications of quantum theory had barely begun to be understood, and who spent the last three decades of his life trying to work out what they meant.
Wheeler’s central philosophical contributions came in two steps. First, in 1978 and 1984, he proposed the delayed-choice thought experiment, a variation on the famous double-slit experiment in which the choice of whether to observe the particle’s path is made after the particle has already passed through the slits. Classical intuition says this is absurd; the particle has already chosen its path. Quantum mechanics says the particle’s path is not fixed until it is observed. Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment has now been performed in the laboratory, first in 1984 at the University of Maryland and then in multiple refined versions since. The results confirm the quantum prediction. The past, in some sense, remains open until it is observed.
From this Wheeler drew a conclusion he called the participatory universe. “We are participators,” he wrote, “in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.” The observer and the observed are not cleanly separable. Every act of observation does some small amount of work in bringing the universe into the form it takes.
The second step came in 1989, when Wheeler presented at a symposium in Tokyo the idea he called it from bit. Every item in the physical world, he argued, derives its existence from the answers to yes-or-no questions, from binary choices registered by measurement. “All physical things are information-theoretic in origin,” he wrote, “and this is a participatory universe.” Reality, at the deepest level, is made of information, and information is made by acts of observation. This is not idealism in any simple sense; Wheeler resisted being called an idealist. But it is a picture in which mind and world are woven together much more tightly than the Newtonian or Cartesian pictures allow.
Here is the place where the Hermetic parallel becomes sharp. The first principle of the Kybalion is the Principle of Mentalism: “The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” Wheeler would not have phrased it that way. But his it-from-bit, his participatory universe, and his willingness to say in plain English that “the world is a figment of the imagination” in some deep sense, describe a reality in which observation, information, and what the Hermeticists called Mind are all closely bound together. Whether this rises to genuine isomorphism or is a deep analogy is a question we will work on in Module 2. For now, notice that Wheeler, starting from the mathematics of quantum mechanics and general relativity and never as far as I know reading the Corpus Hermeticum, ended up in a place that the authors of the Corpus Hermeticum would have recognized.
Sir Arthur Eddington and the Mind-Stuff of the World
Sir Arthur Eddington was one of the great astrophysicists of the early twentieth century. He led the 1919 solar eclipse expedition whose measurements confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity, essentially introducing Einstein to the English-speaking world. His technical work on stellar structure remains foundational. He was also a Quaker, a philosopher, and one of the most eloquent defenders of a mind-first picture of reality produced by any professional scientist of his generation.
In his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World, based on the Gifford Lectures he had delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1927, Eddington wrote a sentence that has been quoted ever since. “The stuff of the world,” he said, “is mind-stuff.” He went on to clarify. “The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds. It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”
Eddington’s argument was essentially this. Classical materialism had assumed a solid, mechanical substrate called matter, from which mind was somehow to be derived. Relativity and quantum mechanics had dissolved that solid substrate. What remained, at the fundamental level, was structure, relation, information, abstraction. These were more naturally described as mind-like than as matter-like. Idealism, Eddington concluded, was not an exotic philosophical indulgence. It was the most natural interpretation of what physics itself had discovered.
Eddington’s contemporary Sir James Jeans, another leading British physicist and astronomer, wrote in the same period, “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” And Max Planck, the originator of the quantum hypothesis, said in 1931, “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.”
These are not stray remarks from minor figures. These are the deliberate philosophical conclusions of three of the most accomplished physicists of the twentieth century, stated repeatedly in books written for general readers and colleagues alike. They are not the unanimous view of physicists; most of the community has always preferred some form of materialism or instrumentalism. But they are a substantial and persistent minority view, articulated by men whose command of the physics was beyond question, and they deserve to be included in any honest account of how the founders understood what they had discovered.