The Scientific Mind and the Mystical Outlook The scientific mind and the mystical outlook figure in the popular imagination as eternal enemies. Both are felt to be important but somehow irreconcilable in ultimate matters. It is worth inquiring whether the supposed irreconcilableness is anything other than a superficial impression. We may remark at the very beginning that, historically, science and religion have not always stood in stark opposition. And most significantly the absence of stark opposition has been with regard to the science that is the very foundation of all sciences: physics. What is called classical or Newtonian physics was

Science Materialism Mysticism by Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) Foreword to the second Edition The Clear Ray Trust, Pondicherry, is happy to publish the second Edition of Amal Kiran's book "Science Materialism, Mysticism". The Issue Materialism versus Mysticism now seems to be an important point of intellectual debate and this book throws a considerable amount of light on the subject and helps to clarity many concepts relating to the subject. Did Classical Physics Bear Out Materialism? One of the distinguishing marks of the present century is the revolution in physics. This revolution has swept away many of the old

Matter, Life, Mind 1 Our scrutiny of scientific opinions has deals so far with the problem of matter and mind and the problem of with the life. We have examined these problems in indent" and each other, thus giving the fullest scope possible scientific features peculiar to either of them and not subduing them in the interests of a theory derived from outside? field concerned. Both our surveys have reached a corn conclusion which is all the stronger because reached along two independent lines: namely, that matter is not the basic reality. We have discovered, on strictly scientific grounds, that mind cannot be reduced to matter and that matter can

Mysticism and Einstein's Relativity Physics I When Archbishop Davidson, in the early days of relativity theory, asked Einstein what effect his theory would have on religion, Einstein answered: "None. Relativity is a purely scientific theory and has nothing to do with religion." This answer seems to give short shrift to any attempt at aligning with a mystical view of the universe the revolution in scientific thought which Einstein brought about. But Eddington suggests that Einstein's remark must be under- stood in the context of the times in which it was made. In those days, Eddington, explains, one had to become expert in dodging p

Matter and Mind "advance" hits were scored in stringently conditioned experiments so greatly in excess of chance expectations that the odds against their being in fact due to chance were, on the most conservative estimate, of the order of 1032 (i.e. 1 followed by 32 zeros) to 1. She takes it upon herself to return a clear answer to the four most important criticisms about such astonishing results. She writes: "First, the successes could not have been due to inadequate shuffling of the cards. No use was made of such relatively crude methods as hand shuffling: the order of presentation of the cards was systematically 'randomized', by methods which are familiar to stat

The Originality of Einstein A "Close-Up" of the World's Greatest Scientist On April 18, 1955, died Albert Einstein who had been born on March 14, 1879. To have lived in the time of a man like him has been a rare privilege. For, there is not the slightest doubt that he is the most original thinker in the whole history of science. }.W.N. Sullivan perhaps hits the mark when he says that while we can imagine Galileo's and Newton's work done by other geniuses we find it extremely difficult to believe anyone would have discovered relativity theory if Einste

LSD and the Mind of the Future 1 Extraordinary experiences by the use of drugs: this issue has been growing ever livelier since 1954 when Aldous Huxley conducted experiments on himself and wrote on the consciousness-changing effects of Mescaline. With the many- sided study of a drug 7000 times as potent - LSD, after the German Lyserg Saiire Diethylamide (=Lysergic Acid in common English) - we have reached the peak-point of controversy. For, with a pill weighing 1/200,000 of an ounce, LSD not only releases the human consciousness from its common bounds but also expands it to an extent which seems infinite. We thus pass beyond medi

Matter and Life The question before us is: "What conclusions are to be drawn from the findings of science on what is called organic nature as commonly distinguished from inorganic? In other words, science point towards the validity of the common distinction or does it indicate life to be merely a certain state of complex matter and ultimately reducible to physico chemical terms?" We need not accept science as the final arbiter, but it would be illuminating to see whether a branch of inquiry which has great influence on philosophic thought today and which at one time was almost unanimously taken to "debunk" all non-materialism does actually offer an

Probability in Microphysics: Its Implications and Consequences Einstein brought about in 1905 a tremendous revolution in physics when he dethroned Newton's concept of a universal static space and a time flowing uniformly everywhere - an absolute space and an absolute time in terms of which there could be a measurement of absolute motion. The principle on which this revolution was based may be stated as follows: "None but observable factors - that is, factors definable by means of physical processes, factors distinguishable by experimental operations - can be considered to be in causal dependence." Einstein showed that scientific apparatus, e

Einstein's Four-dimensional Continuum 1 On April 18, 1955, passed away the most original scientific thinker the world has seen. A host of exceptionally revolutionary ideas were let loose by him from the beginning of his scientific career in the early years of this century up to the very end of his life: it is not more than a couple of years since he propounded his last version of what he called the Unified Field Theory, the fullest expansion of the relativity theory with which his name burst on us in 1904. Perhaps the most notable contribution by his work to the world of thought is the concept of a four-dimensional continuum of spac