"It is in fact wonderful how physics - as soon as it is concerned not with technical purposes but with general results - without knowing it gets into cosmogony, astrology, theosophy, or whatever you wish to call it, in short, into a mystic discipline of the whole." (K W Friedrich Schlegel, "Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms", cca. 1797–1800)
"The idea of an atom has been so constantly associated with incredible assumptions of infi nite strength, absolute rigidity, mystical actions at a distance and indivisibility, that chemists and many other reasonable naturalists of modern times, losing all patience with it, have dismissed it to the realms of metaphysics, and made it smaller than 'anything we can conceive'." (William T Kelvin, "On the Size of Atoms", Nature Vol. 1, 1870)
"[...] in the present-day reconstruction of physics, fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Modes of Thought", 1938)
"Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in words - be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations imposed by language and 'linear' thinking. Modern physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate and necessarily inaccurate. They are the counterparts of the Eastern myths, symbols and poetic images, and it is at this level that I shall draw the parallels. The same idea about matter is conveyed, for example, to the Hindu by the cosmic dance of the god Shiva as to the physicist by certain aspects of quantum field theory. Both the dancing god and the physical theory are creations of the mind: models to describe their authors' intuition of reality." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)
"The conceptual framework of quantum mechanics, supported by massive volumes of experimental data, forces contemporary physicists to express themselves in a manner that sounds, even to the uninitiated, like the language of mystics." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)
"An aura of mysticism still surrounds the concept that has since been called 'imaginary numbers', and anyone who encounters these numbers for the first time is intrigued by their strange properties. But 'strange' is relative: with sufficient familiarity, the strange object of yesterday becomes the common thing of today." (Eli Maor, "e: The Story of a Number", 1994)
"The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion, A physicist who attempts to link it with his own work has abandoned physics." (Stephen Hawking)
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