Atoms with curiosity

The most profound scientific discoveries were made by the most religious of men. Michael Faraday was one of the greatest scientists the worl...

The most profound scientific discoveries were made by the most religious of men. Michael Faraday was one of the greatest scientists the world has ever seen; his discoveries in electromagnetism, electrochemistry and magneto-optics laid the foundations for the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, which lie at the heart of our ideas about the Universe today. Yet like Isaac Newton before him, Faraday was a deeply religious man who found no conflict at all between his passionate faith and the cold logic of science that dictated his work. On the contrary, he saw the Creator’s marvellous powers manifest in all of Nature, and his own scientific quest as a mission to discover and display His marvels for others to see.

Faraday belonged to a small sect called the Sandemanians, whose belief was that one must live a life of utter simplicity, humaneness and honesty, indeed a life in imitation of Jesus Christ. In his Christmas lectures for children titled Chemical History of a Candle, Faraday revealed a profound and wonderful truth about our world, that if we look closely enough at just about anything at all, sooner or later we end up contemplating the entire Universe!

This awareness, that we inhabit a house-that-jack-built world where everything is tied up with everything else, brings with it an intense wave of euphoria. Richard Feynman, that brilliant and utterly irreverent scientist who gave us quantum mechanics, called it the ‘ecstasy of knowing’: ‘‘It is a great adventure to contemplate the Universe, beyond Man; to contemplate what it would be like without Man… to view Life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the Universe is, this thing, an atom with curiosity, that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders’’.

Cut to the Chandogya Upanishad.

Fetch me a fruit of the banyan tree. (Here is one, sir.)
Break it. (I have broken it, sir.)
What do you see? (Very tiny seeds, sir.)
Break one. (I have broken it, sir.)
Now what do you see? (Nothing, sir.)
My child, what you do not perceive is the Essence; and in that Essence the mighty banyan tree exists. Believe me, child, in that Essence is the Self of all that is. That is the True, that is the Self. And you are that Self.