The “woo woo” beliefs of renowned scientists

– Sir Roger Penrose, ‘Discussions of “Shadows of the Mind”’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1994, 1(1), pp. 17-24


“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely – the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by ‘mind’ I do not exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I do not at all mean stuff. Still this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness… It is the physical aspects of the world that we have to explain.”

– Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Macmillan, 1928, pp. 276-7


“Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into sub-consciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take to be the world- stuff… We have only one approach, namely, through our direct knowledge of mind. The supposed approach through the physical world leads only into the cycle of physics, where we run round and round like a kitten chasing its tail and never reach the world-stuff at all It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference – inference either intuitive or deliberate”

– Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Macmillan, 1928, pp. 280 & 281


“Modern microphysics turns the observer once again into a little lord of creation in his microcosm, with the ability (at least partially) of freedom of choice and fundamentally uncontrollable effects on that which is being observed. But if these phenomena are dependent on how (with what experimental system) they are observed, then is it not possible that there are also phenomena … that depend on who observes them (ie, on the nature of the psyche of the observer)?”

– Wolfgang Pauli, Letter of Pauli to CG Jung, 23 December 1947; in Meier 2001, pp. 32-3


“To us … the only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality-the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical-as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously … It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.”

– Wolfgang Pauli, “The Influence of Archetypical Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,” in C.G. Jung and W.Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and Psyche, New York: Panthean Books, Bollingen Series L1, 1955, pp. 208, 210


“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

– Max Planck, interview in The Observer, 25 January 1931a, 17 (column 3)


“As a physicist, and therefore as a man who has spent his whole life in the service of the most down-to-earth science, namely the exploration of matter, no one is going to take me for a starry-eyed dreamer. After all my exploration of the atom, then, let me tell you this: there is no matter as such. All matter arises and exists only by virtue of a force which sets the atomic particles oscillating, and holds them together in that tiniest of solar systems, the atom… we must suppose, behind this force, a conscious, intelligent spirit. This spirit is the ultimate origin of matter.”

– Max Planck, ‘Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter]’, speech delivered in Florence in 1944, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, Abt Va, Rep. 11 Plank, Nr. 1797


“As every act of research measurement has a more or less causal influence on the very process that is under observation, it is practically impossible to separate the law that we are seeking to discover behind the happening itself from the methods that are being used to bring about the discovery.”

– Max Planck, Where is science going? New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1932, pp. 95

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”

– Max Planck, Unity of the Physical Picture of the World [Единство физической картины мира], Moscow, Nauka, 1966, pp. 50


“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

– Max Planck, ‘Epilogue: A Socratic Dialogue’, Where is Science Going? 1932, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, pp. 217


“I am not afraid to call this mysterious creator, as have all civilized nations of the earth for thousands of years: God. So you see, my dear friends, how in our days, in which people no longer believe in spirit as the foundation of all creation, and therefore find themselves in bitter estrangement from God, it is precisely the minute and the invisible that leads truth back from the grave of materialist delusion, and opens the doors into the lost and forgotten world of the spirit.”

– Max Planck, ‘Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter]’, speech delivered in Florence in 1944, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, Abt Va, Rep. 11 Plank, Nr. 1797


“There is, in fact, no clear-cut division between the subject and object; they form an indivisible whole which now becomes nature. This thesis finds its final expression in the wave-parable, which tells us that nature consists of waves and that these are of the general quality of waves of knowledge, or of absence of knowledge, in our own minds.”

– Sir James Jeans, ‘The new world-picture of modern physics’, Presidential Address delivered at Aberdeen, 5 September 1934: in Nature, 1934, 134, pp. 355-65


“The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”

– Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, pp. 137


“Each step was from particle to waves, or from the material to the mental; the final picture consists wholly of waves, and its ingredients are wholly mental constructs … the cumulative evidence of various pieces of probable reasoning makes it seem more and more likely that reality is better described as mental than as material … There is no longer a dualism of mind and matter, but of waves and particles. The two members of this dualism are no longer antagonistic or mutually exclusive; rather they are complementary. We need no longer devise elaborate mechanisms, as Descartes and Leibniz did, to keep the two in step, for one controls the other – the waves control the particles, or in the old terminology the mental controls the material.”

– Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1942, pp. 202, 202 & 204

“We are faced with the following remarkable situation. While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space. We do not usually realise this fact, because we have entirely taken to thinking of the personality of a human being, or for that matter also that of an animal, as located in the interior of its body. To learn that it cannot really be found there is so amazing that it meets with doubt and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life?’ [1944], in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967b, pp. 122

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, interview in The Observer, Jan 11, 1931

“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life?’ [1944], in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967b, pp. 117–127

“The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life?’ [1944], in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967b, pp. 154-155


“Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life?’ [1944], in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967b, pp. 89


“Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. All the ‘minds’ in the world, which we know through our personal experience, are singular.”

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life?’ [1944], in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967b, pp. 88


“The universe is entirely mental … and we must learn to perceive it as such.”

– Richard Conn Henry, ‘The Mental Universe’, Nature, 2005, 436(7), pp. 29

“Non-local causality is a concept that had never played any role in physics, other than in rejection (‘action-at-a-distance’), until Aspect showed in 1981 that the alternative would be the abandonment of the cherished belief in mind-independent reality; suddenly, spooky- action-at-a-distance became the lesser of two evils, in the minds of the materialists. Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.”

– Richard Conn Henry, Henry RC & Palmquist SR, 2007: henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html (accessed 19 April 2023)


“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.”

– Eugene Wigner, ‘Remarks on the mind-body question’ (1961), reprinted in JA Wheeler & WH Zurek (eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 168-81


“When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner: Historical, Philosophical, and Socio-Political Papers: Historical and Biographical Reflections and Syntheses, 2013, Springer Science & Business Media, pp. 28


“Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.”

– Eugene Wigner, Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses, 2012, Springer Science & Business Media, pp. 252


“[T]he laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated … without recourse to the concept of consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, ‘The Probability of the Existence of a Self-Reproducing Unit’, contributed in M. Polanyi, The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday, 11th March 1961 (1961), pp. 232


“It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter.”

– Bernard Haisch, The God Theory, Weiser, 2006, pp. 137


“Modern quantum theory, the overarching principles of twentieth century physics, leads to quite a different view of reality, a view that man, or intelligent life, or communicating observer participator are the whole means by which the very universe is created: without them, nothing.”

– John Archibald Wheeler, ‘The anthropic universe’, 18 February 2006: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686#transcript (accessed 19 April 2023)


“No theory of physics that deals only with physics will ever explain physics. I believe that as we go on trying to understand the universe, we are at the same time trying to understand man. Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected…”

– John Archibald Wheeler, quoted by Florence Helitzer, The Princeton Galaxy, Intellectual Digest 1973 (June), pp. 32


“Quantum states are not physical objects: they exist only in our imagination.”

– Asher Peres, ‘Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Shannon’, Department of Physics, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, ArXiv, 2003, pp. 2

“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

– Werner Heisenberg, quoted in ‘Bertlmann’s socks and the nature of reality’, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics: Collected Papers on Quantum Philosophy, 2004, Cambridge: Cambridge University, pp. 139-158


“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

– Werner Heisenberg, Das Naturgesetz und die Struktur der Materie, 1967, as translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter, 1981, pp. 34

“I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by electrons.”

– Freeman Dyson, Disturbing The Universe, 1979, Harper & Row, New York, pp. 249


“Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself”

– Adam Frank, ‘Minding Matter’, Aeon, 13 March 2017


“Some consciousness researchers might think that they are being hard-nosed and concrete when they appeal to the authority of physics. When pressed on this issue, though, we physicists are often left looking at our feet, smiling sheepishly and mumbling something about ‘it’s complicated’. We know that matter remains mysterious just as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those mysteries should be. Classifying consciousness as a material problem is tantamount to saying that consciousness, too, remains fundamentally unexplained.”

– Adam Frank, ‘Minding Matter’, Aeon, 13 March 2017


“Consciousness and matter are different aspects of the same reality.”

– Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, The Unity of Nature, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, pp. 250


“Mind or something of the nature as mind must exist throughout the entire universe. This is, I believe, the truth. We may never be able to prove it, but it is the most economical hypothesis: it fits the facts much more simply … than one-sided idealism or one-sided materialism”

– Sir Julian Huxley, ‘The biologist looks at man’, Fortune, 1942, 26(6), pp. 139-52


“There is no need to regard the observer as basically separate from what he sees nor to reduce him to an epiphenomenon of the objective process. More broadly one could say that, through the human being, the universe has created a mirror to observe itself.”

– David Bohm, The Undivided Universe, Routledge, 2002, pp. 389


“Thought and matter have a great similarity of order. In a way, nature is alive, as Whitehead would say, all the way to the depths. And intelligent. Thus it is both mental and material, as we are.”

– David Bohm, in dialogue with philosopher Renee Weber: ‘Nature as Creativity’, ReVision, 1982 5(2), pp. 35-40


“The stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create … In them the universe begins to itself.”

– George Wald, ‘Life and mind in the universe’, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry: Quantum Biology Symposium, 1984, 11(1), pp. 1-15


“Mind, rather than being a very late development in the evolution of living things, restricted to organisms with the most complex nervous systems – all of which I had believed to be true – that Mind instead has been there always, and that this universe is life-breeding because the pervasive presence of Mind had guided it to be so. That thought, though elating as a game is elating, so offended my scientific possibilities as to embarrass me. It took only a few weeks, however, for me to realize that I was in excellent company. That kind of thought is not only deeply embedded in millennia-old Eastern philosophies, but it has been expressed plainly by a number of great and very recent physicists.”

– George Wald, ‘The cosmology of life and mind,’ Noetic Sciences Review, 1989, 10, 10


“The harmony of natural law … reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

– Albert Einstein, ‘Religion and science’, The World as I See It, Citadel Press, 1999, pp. 24-9

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me in support of such views.”

– Albert Einstein, statement to the German anti-Nazi diplomat Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg around 1941, as quoted in Löwenstein, 1968


“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

– Albert Einstein, letter to Phyllis Wright (January 24, 1936), published in Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children, Prometheus Books, 2002, pp. 129


“There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.”

– John von Neumann, in Macrae N, John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More, American Mathematical Society, 1992, pp. 379


“Sir, an equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God.”

– Srinivasa Ramanujan, statement to a friend, quoted in Ramanujan, the Man and the Mathematician by Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, 1967, pp. 88


“It is the revised understanding of the nature of human beings, and of the causal role of human consciousness in the unfolding of reality, that is, I believe, the most exciting thing about the new physics, and probably, in the final analysis, also the most important contribution of science to the well-being of our species.”

– Henry Stapp, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer, The Frontiers Collection, Germany: Springer, 2007, pp. 6


“This issue of the ‘collapse of the wave packet’ cannot be really avoided: After all, the role of an interpretation is to establish a correspondence between the formalism of a theory describing a system and the results of the experiments – or, rather, the records of these results – accessible to the observer. And we perceive outcomes of measurements and other events originating at the quantum level alternative by the alternative, rather than all of the alternatives at once. An exhaustive answer to this question would undoubtedly have to involve a model of ‘consciousness’, since what we are really asking concerns our (observers) impression that ‘we are conscious’ of just one of the alternatives. Such [a] model of consciousness is presently not available.”

– Wojciech Zurek, W. H. ‘Preferred states, predictability, classicality and the environment-induced decoherence’, Progress of Theoretical Physics, 1993, 89(2), pp. 281–312


According to a Pew Research poll, just over half of scientists belonging to the world’s largest general scientific society (the AAAS, which has a total of 120,000 members) believe in some form of deity or higher power.

– Wormald, B., ‘Scientists and Belief’, Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 2009: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/#fn-12952-1 (Accessed 21 Apr. 2023)