Cosmic Religionwas expressed in esoteric terms not so much because of inher-
ited superstitions (Newton and his fellows were not fools) but
because it strove to describe what was taken as being essentially
indescribable. To believe that the alchemic efforts of Newton
and others were futile is to miss the point. Like the ancient
oracle, whose wisdom derived from equivocal words that forced
a struggle of interpretation, alchemy’s allure was not to dissolve
but to enter into its very mysteriousness.
Alchemy’s inheritors
Alchemy as an explicitly acknowledged goal of science died out
as the scientifi c worldview became mainstream. Lead can now
be turned into gold by bombarding the metal with high energy
particles – though the expense of the process far outweighs any
profi t from the gold. But I suspect that contemporary cosmol-
ogy embodies something of the old alchemic spirit still.
Today, many individuals – physicists and laypeople alike – are
interested in phenomena like quantum entanglement, possible
links between consciousness and reality, and the fi ne-tuning of
the universe. The interest stems not just from the wonder that
is the natural response to scientifi c discovery. They also feel
tempted, and sometimes compelled, to draw what might be
called sacred conclusions from it. This is more than a power-
ful sense of wonder. The suggestion is that there are uncanny
resonances between what science unveils and older spiritual
convictions. The implication is that science might be a welcome
source of new insights, which could revivify old myths that
have grown cold to the agnostic mind. It’s what Einstein called
‘cosmic religion’. Cosmology might even be thought of as the
new metaphysics – the way we now ask the big questions of
where we come from, what we are, whence we’re headed. If
the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages liked to specu-
late about the number of angels on pin heads, we today like to
speculate about the number of dimensions wrapped up in string
theory.