ALL THE LIGHT WE CAN SEE

Audio: Listen to this post. In January 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published in Annalen der Physik the paper “Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem” (Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem) that announced what is now known as the Schrödinger equation. This paper, universally acknowledged as one of the most important intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, created a revolution in physics. Quantum physics proved to be all-encompassing: For the first time, physicists understood the structure of the periodic table of chemical elements, the conduction of electricity in metals, the energy production in stars, and the first three minutes of the universe. Surprisingly, a new

Audio: Listen to this post. Introduction: The Wave of Change When I looked at the old photograph of my “happy family,” buried for years in a forgotten album (see illustration), I immediately recognized my father, mother, and sister, but the other person in the photo—Georgie—was a stranger. I seldom saw myself in a mirror, and years later, I had no memory of what I looked like when I was ten years old (I am guessing my age). More unsettling, I had no memory of what it felt like to inhabit the body of

Audio: Listen to this post. 1. Give up the dream of Paradise on Earth.  The sight of the rubble of Hiroshima killed the comforting narrative that the progress of science and technology leads to universal happiness; the sound of frozen corpses thrown on sledges in the Gulag destroyed the utopian story of humans instituting a perfect political order; the smell of burning bodies in Auschwitz annihilated Nietzsche’s myth that the ascendance of the Overman, the perfect race, will raise humankind to a new level of existence. Bacon and Descartes imagined a glorious future

Audio: Listen to this post. As you all know, the theme of this year’s Colloquium is Student as Journeyman: Education, Formation, and Transformation. Mr. Powers asked me to talk on the education part of the theme. Tonight, I thought that we would look at liberal education and modernity philosophically. I wish to take as a starting point a quotation from Josef Pieper. “A properly philosophical question always pierces the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world . . .” Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act, p. 73. If we view this talk as a

Audio: Listen to this post. No Historical Memory Yesterday, I watched the superb movie Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan.  The movie is historically accurate, with one caveat. Nolan could not have presented the new physics—quantum mechanics—in his film. The closest he comes is Werner Heisenberg pronouncing in a lecture that there is no causality in the new physics of submicroscopic particles. During the movie’s time period, quantum mechanics was not completely understood; only years later, with the double slit experiment with single electrons done by a Japanese group at Hitachi, was

Audio: Listen to this post. The Starting Point Most of us are children of unhappy marriages, so we knew from suffering in early life, say by the age of seven or eight, that the human relations around us were failed marriages, parents abandoning their children, and the betrayal of friendships. We saw that material prosperity and career advancement were hogwash, for they were not the path to happiness as promised. We knew what we wanted most of all, unconditional love, although we may not have had the vocabulary to express this universal desire.

Audio: Listen to this post. A friend of mine, a fellow theoretical physicist, after seeing Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer, asked for my take on Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in my private speech I call the Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind. Currently, the Laboratory is shifting from the theoretical design of thermonuclear weapons to the production of pits, the grapefruit-sized cores that trigger a thermonuclear bomb. The Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind hasn’t produced a certified pit in over a decade. In 2018, Congress passed a law mandating that Los Alamos

Audio: Listen to this post. The Patristic Fathers embraced the theological insights of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopogite[1]: God is not any of the names used in the Old and New Testaments, not God of gods, Holy of holies, Cause of the ages, the still breeze, cloud, and rock.[2] Pseudo-Dionysius insists that God is not Mind, Greatness, Power, or Truth in any way we can understand. God “cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can hold him. He is not one of the things that are, and he is no thing among

To see the divine in human life, we must look beyond capitalism and the consumer culture.

Audio: Listen to this post. Ernest Hemingway admitted, “Nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy, unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”[1] If he had climbed into the ring, the great Russian writer probably would have scored a technical knockout in the first round. At the age of forty-one, Leo Tolstoy published, in 1869, the last installment of War and Peace. Eight years later, he finished Anna Karenina, arguably the greatest novel ever written. At the age of fifty, Tolstoy achieved everything he desired in life. A famous

Audio: Listen to this post. Prologue Brianna Smythe took one look at Joey and said to herself, Bingo. There’s my ticket to the Big Time. The young psychologist immediately knew her trip to New Harmony, Utah, and the subsequent hassle with the local rednecks over the whereabouts of the cabin that Joey and his great-grandmother lived in was going to pay off in a big way. Brianna observed that Joey established brief eye contact with her and then looked down at the porch floor. The young boy, who was a good six inches