I have been reading this book by Albert Nolan for my spiritual reading. The way he presented how the universe has been considered to be a mystery even to scientists made me more conscious of the creative power of God and the wonderful way it is gleaned in this world. Hanep! Read on and be enriched.
From Albert Nolan, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, Jesuit Communications Foundation Inc., 2006, 39-40.
It is not for nothing that Einstein’s name has become a household word for exceptional intelligence. He was a genius like no other. What he and many others during the last hundred years have been able to demonstrate is that the mechanistic worldview that we call science is simply unscientific. And while it took some time for the consequences of his discoveries, and other similar discoveries, to be appreciated, today the vast worldwide community of scientists, with few exceptions, has moved beyond the mechanistic view of reality. […]
One of Einsten’s great discoveries was that energy and matter were, in the words of Bill Bryson, “two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.” Nor was this some kind of vague theory. Einstein actually measured the amount of matter (its mass) that would be the equivalent of a particular amount of energy. Hence the world’s most famous formula: E=mc2.
This could simply not be reconciled with the mechanistic model of physics because energy was supposed to be an activity or movement and matter was supposed to be a thing. How could a thing become a movement and how could an activity become a particle of matter? […]
When Einstein and numerous other scientists “opened up” the atom and analyzed its “content” into electrons, protons, neutrons, and numerous other “particles” right down to infinitesimally small quarks, they soon realized that they were not in fact dealing with particles, nor waves, or any other recognizable objects. They were dealing with patterns and relationships. But how can you have patters and relationships with nothing that is being patterned and related?
The mystery only deepened when the great physicist Niels Bohr cam across the quantum leap. Electrons which we have to treat as particles moving around in an orbit, sometimes jump from one orbit to another without passing through the space between the two orbits. How is it possible?
There are any number of other puzzles that defy explanation, not because we do not have enough evidence but because in the subatomic world the empirical evidence is self-contradictory. There seems to be no logic or rationality down there. It is, to us, a very strange world. […]
The universe is not what it used to be. It is not a machine. It is a mystery.
