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UnPC Scientists

Thanks to Dave Edwards for a link to this comment by Michio Kaku:

“As you know, I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. It?s based on music or little vibrating strings thus giving us particles that we see in nature. The laws of chemistry that we struggled with in high school would be the melodies that you can play on these vibrating strings. The Universe would be a symphony of these vibrating strings and the mind of God that Einstein wrote about at length would be cosmic music resonating through this nirvana? through this 11 dimensional hyperspace?that would be the mind of God. We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word ?God? and not blush. The fact of the matter is that we are dealing with the cosmic questions of existence and meaning.”

This reminds me of Keynes’s speech about Newton, from which I quote:

Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty – just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.

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