Sublime

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

Might there be the possibility that the universe is more active than we imagine and that it may even be capable of making itself known to us?

Even more important than these contributions, he set in motion the process of rethinking our worldview—a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming “certainty,” which is one of the main roots of scientific thinking.

So Everett’s story is indeed that of an innovative young researcher challenging a prevailing consensus and being largely ignored until, decades later, his view gradually becomes the new consensus. But the basis of Everett’s innovation was not a claim that the prevailing theory is false, but that it is true!

One after another, the greatest figures in physics seemed to develop an unexpected late-career interest in the mystery of life itself, even taking abrupt shifts toward the formal study of biology.

certain critical number, provoking what physicists

In contrast to a mechanistic and deterministic world, quantum physics describes a universe of indeterminacy, entanglement, superposition, complementarity, uncertainty, and not the least, potentiality.

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter