I'm going to have to call [citation needed] on this claim!

Some are, same in any walk of life. But I wouldn't say "a lot".

Eugene Wigner, influential physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, once stated that, while many philosophical ideas “may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics… materialism is not."

Rudolf Peierls, a Manhattan Project physicist, inventor of the atomic bomb, believed that something about the human minds transcends matter.

These 3 come to mind immediately
 

catalog

Well-known member
My uni mate was a scientist and he said several people in his seminars were Christians he was very surprised
 

version

Well-known member
I like what Herzog said about man evolving due to fish fleeing the hell of the ocean.

"Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue."
 

catalog

Well-known member
Firenczi said opposite. I'm going off herzog the older I get. I still love his 70s output but sometimes I wish he would shut his trap
 

version

Well-known member
He definitely leans into his own image too much now. The cameos make him into more of a joke than he needs to be. He reminds me of Zizek.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps

Eugene Wigner, influential physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, once stated that, while many philosophical ideas “may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics… materialism is not."

Rudolf Peierls, a Manhattan Project physicist, inventor of the atomic bomb, believed that something about the human minds transcends matter.

These 3 come to mind immediately
Oh well that's most of them then, I concede your point. 😛
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
He's ruining his own legacy
I saw a mate post something on FB the other day about Herzog saying he and his wife have never exchanged a cross word in 50 years of marriage or something. I was like, fuck off you bullshitter.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Tea, you take your science in polite, measured doses from New Scientist.
Ha! The ultimate put-down. I confess that I do buy it once or twice a year but it's not a regular habit (promise).

Presumably Wolfram's self-generating cellular Theory Of Everything is going to sweep away the rot, though?
 

version

Well-known member
I saw a mate post something on FB the other day about Herzog saying he and his wife have never exchanged a cross word in 50 years of marriage or something. I was like, fuck off you bullshitter.
What do your mate and his wife have to do with Herzog?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Eugene Wigner, influential physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, once stated that, while many philosophical ideas “may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics… materialism is not."

OK, I think this is worth pursuing. We might be talking at cross-purposes here and, with respect, there might be a bit of strawmanning going on, on your part. What do you understand by 'materialism'? If you mean particle whizzing around within a sterile, inert vacuum and bouncing off each other like little billiard balls according to deterministic laws, then sure, that is not a good model of reality. But then, nobody has actually thought this for a century.

There's a book I read as an undergraduate called 'The Matter Myth', which I think you might be interested in. The authors are a highly respected theoretical physicist and a science writer with a solid science background (astrophysics PhD), so the ideas presented are in no way "fringe physics". The gist of it, as I remember, is that it makes much more sense to consider information, rather than matter, to be the primary basis of physical reality. It has a chapter titled "From 'It' To 'Bit'" and ends with a great line about how the old dualist picture of matter/spirit or brain/mind, the 'ghost in the machine', is no longer valid "not because there is no ghost, but because there is no machine". Which fits in well with the work done by Hawking and others on the interface between thermodynamics (where information is of supreme importance), GR and QM, and with ideas based on the AdS-CFT correspondence and holographic cosmology.


So yeah, 'materialism' as Newton and Maxwell, and probably Planck and even Einstein (who objected to quantum non-locality more than he did to the uncertainty principle), would have understood it is dead and buried and has been for ages.

However - this picture is still lightyears away from Fritjof Capra and "maybe QM explains telepathy/OBEs/past lives", which is what people often mean when they say "materialism is dead".
 
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