Preparing for the Miraculous

136 eleven talksevolving from order to disorder; still, biological or socialevolution shows us the complex emerging from the simple.How is this possible? How can structure arise fromdisorder? ... There is an obvious contradiction between thestatic view of dynamics and the evolutionary paradigm ofthermodynamics.” 19 (Ilya Prigogine )In one of his first though least known books, QuantumQuestions, Ken Wilber examines the metaphysics of the20th century physicists, quoting some of them extensively.His conclusion is clear and convincing. The physicists whoworked out the two great revolutions of relativity and quantummechanics – Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger,Eddington, and others – were also profound philosophersand even, Wilber writes, mystics. The reason was that theyfelt themselves confronted with the essence of things, withReality as such and with everything Reality may stand for.For some three decades they were rethinking the foundationsof existence, and although their vantage point wasthat of scientific materialism, they were capable of expandingtheir horizon sufficiently to encompass the big questionswithin it, even those beyond Judeo-Christianity.The great theoretical physicists of the following generation– Dirac, Feynman, Weinberg, Hawking – were verydifferently focused (at least most of them). To them thebig questions led to nothing but confrontational and uselessverbiage; what counted was to solve the mathematicalproblems posed by the accepted paradigms. The rest onecould speculate or joke about, but it could only be meaningfullyapproached after the bases of physics (fundamentallythe Grand Unified Theory) would be found. As they saw it,everything had come about by the universal laws and constants,obeying Chance. The following are two examples of19 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: Order out of Chaos, p. xxix.