3. Bohr and Heisenberg

“Whereas the new nihilist is driven away from what Bohr and Heisenberg called ‘the old religions’...”

At a time when from the highest vantage points of scientific discovery, the very substance of the universe was being called into question, these two men stood at the summit; poised between past and future. It is a measure of their greatness that their minds were able to absorb the earth-shattering insights their work revealed to them, without rejecting their own cultural past, or abandoning the collective religious and philosophical history of humanity. Their standing as post-classical physicists, as well as post Judaeo-Christians, transcends the facile atheism of contemporary scientific popularisers. Thus they embody a moment of consciousness in the world of an invitation towards something beyond the ‘old religions’ that encompassed the same fundamental truths.