Cosmic Religionand attempt to fi nd some answers, though answers may not be
forthcoming and even when they do arrive they are likely to
pose deeper questions again. Why should the universe be trans-
parent to our probing and not just strange to us? The risk is that
into these wells of mystery can be thrown all sorts of specula-
tions, some scientifi c, some spiritual. The diffi culty is in discern-
ing the useful conjectures from the bad, the reasonable from the
mad. And for this reason, Rees prefers to stick with those mys-
teries that can be tried by scientifi c means: defi ne theories and
test for empirical evidence.
All in all he’s concluded that religion probably has nothing
to offer science; he affi rms Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of ‘non-
overlapping magisteria’, which is to say that the two enterprises
are about entirely different things. The hydrogen atom, the sim-
plest structure in the universe, is hard enough to understand.
It just seems wildly extravagant to believe we can understand
things that are far more complicated, let alone anything that
might be associated with the idea of God. He prefers to contem-
plate the vastness of space and time than the concerns associ-
ated with traditional spirituality.
This can feel rather empty, for all that many physicists, perhaps
most, do reach a conclusion something like it. They stand in awe
of the universe and know that understanding comes slowly and
may never fi nally arrive in its entirety. However, some venture
further.
Orderly, beautiful, wise
They may do so because they ask themselves a question that
I think all physicists whisper from time to time. It was famously
posed by Eugene Wigner in 1960, when he wrote an essay
en titled: ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the
Natural Sciences.’
That mathematics is the language of the natural sciences has
been long celebrated. Galileo wrote as much in the seventeenth
century: ‘The universe cannot be read until we have learned the