Your favourite novel isn’t necessarily the best novel you think you’ve ever read. My favourite novel, the one that helped form my world view, best encapsulates and illuminates it, which celebrates life’s absurdities and which still makes me laugh is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Here in fictional form is Jesus’s recommendation to become like little children – so you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven – but a very English heaven. It is in a vision of a childhood which is in many ways idyllic but also always surprising in its ceaseless inventiveness and its sly, humorous understanding of the childish games that adults play.

It is generally understood as a light, charming fantasy, but in fact it is, I believe, a very dark book, as is its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass.

The Alice books are as prophetic of events in the twentieth century as the dark prophecies of his contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche and he foresaw, too, Sigmund Freud’s account of disturbing forces bubbling up from the depths of the psyche. The Alice books were prophetic, too, of deliberately disconcerting art including Dadaism, Surrealism and some aspects of Modernism, such as the clever playing with form, the abandonment of consensus certainties and its wordplay. ‘’ ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and tumble in the ware…’: the poem Jabbererwocky , embedded in Alice Through the Looking Glass, could have been written by James Joyce.

Lewis Carroll was also in a position – perhaps a unique position - to see that the old certainties of classical physics would give way to something much weirder and more dangerous, because he was an elite mathematician studying the breakthroughs in that discipline which would drive modern science.

Lewis Carroll – real name Charles Hodgson - was weird. His eyes like David Bowie’s, were startlingly different colours. A deeply religious man he also amassed library of the occult which included some of the foundational books of Theosophy, applying Asian mystical thought to the Western esoteric tradition, such as:

· A. P. Sinnett, The Occult World (1881)

· A. P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (1883)

· Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, The Perfect Way (1882)

· Thomas H. Burgoyne, The Light of Egypt; or, The Science of the Soul and the Stars (1889) The author was a member of an occult secret society called the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. The book is a study of ancient Egyptian esoteric practice.

We know from the catalogue of his personal library that Carroll also owned many spiritualist and psychical-research works, such as:

· Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature

· Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World

· Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe

· Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living

He followed the career of the famous levitating medium Daniel Douglas Home, studied spirit writing – alluded to in Alice Through the Looking Glass - and joined the Society for Psychical Research.

But perhaps weirdest thing about Lewis Carroll from today’s perspective is that he seems to have been completely asexual –perhaps the main difference between his vision and the highly sexualised visions of Artaud, Breton and Dali. Because we live in such a down to earth, materialistic and sexualised culture we may find asexuality hard to believe. Asexuality is now the predilection that dare not speak its name.

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I’m reminded of a great aunt who frightened me as a child. She was imperious, radiating ‘old money’ although there was hardly any left and lived in reduced circumstances in a bungalow in Clacton. She could herself have been a character in the Alice books. Think the Duchess. She refused to believe there is such a thing as lesbianism. In her view anyone claiming to be a lesbian was just ‘showing off’. (In England in a time before the counterculture, showing off was just about the worst thing you could do.)

But of course it is possible for people to be asexual. Clinicians now describe an entire spectrum of degree and type of asexuality.

Another character in my new book, Nikola Tesla was perhaps on the far end of that spectrum. He had a violent aversion to earrings and a a glimpse of a petal necklace would send him into a fit. He said he could not bear to touch a woman’s hair, except perhaps with the barrel of a gun.

Oxford university was founded on the model of a monastery and in the later 19^th century the lives of the dons were still monkish. Lewis Carroll was a lecturer at Christ Church College, the grandest and most glamorous of the Oxford colleges, a short walk through meadows to the river where his famous boat trips with Alice Liddell took place. Visitors cannot enter the garden which was the model for Wonderland, but they can glimpse it through gates. Carroll’s subjects were mathematics and symbolic logic to which he made consequential contributions. Much of the humour of the Alice books lies in applying logic ad absurdam.

But it was his study of the pioneering mathematics of the day that enabled him to both inaugurate a golden age of children’s literature and to l foresee many of the great advances in modern physics.

He was a disciple of a German mathematical genius. called Bernhardt Riemann. His breakthrough was to realise that when you are trying to describe the universe using mathematics, it is very helpful if you posit other dimensions than the ones you can perceive with your senses. Posit these other dimensions when you do your calculations then you will be able to describe things more accurately, see richer patterns in them and make more accurate predictions about what will happen in the universe – which can you can then test.

Albert Einstein struggled to formulate his ideas on relativity until it occurred to him to apply Riemann’s maths, at which point his theories snapped into place. Riemann’s ideas on other dimensions have continued to drive modern physics. There is no consensus on a likely Theory of Everything, but most popular candidate in the view of elite physicists is String Theory. Different versions of String Theory posit 6, 11, 25 and even more dimensions. They are understood to abut the dimensions we perceive, prop them up and inform them, perhaps raying in influences we have not yet detected.

What Lewis Carroll intuitively understood was that – logically speaking – these extra dimensions raise profound philosophical questions about the nature of reality. Are these dimensions merely abstractions, just mathematical tools? Or could they be as real as the dimensions we are familiar with? In fact, if the familiar dimensions depend on these other dimensions than maybe they are more real? Could we even visit them?

It was by taking this thought for a walk that Carroll was able to inaugurate a golden age of children’s literature, running through Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz to Narnia, The Hobbit and JK Rowling and Philip Pullman.

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Tesla was one of the many great scientists who shared with Lewis Carroll’s fascination the occult. Marie and Pierre Curie, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Wolfgang Pauli explored mystical Indian philosophy, the Kabbalah, alchemy, and the Rosicrucian brotherhood among other esoteric streams. There is a temptation to to understand all this in an anachronistic way. These scientists lived and worked at a time before the upsurge of today’s evangelical atheism and when leading thinkers were optimistic that science and spirituality could be reconciled.

When the technology developed so that they could observe things at a smaller and smaller level – what came to be known as the quantum realm - they discovered phenomena which would count as supernatural in the realm of human affairs: particles popping in and out of existence - prompting the question Where do they come from? They saw particles passing through solid objects and emerging the other side unchanged like ghosts going through a wall, and particles coordinating their behaviour when there is no detectable causal connection between them, even over very long distances. They also saw that you could change the behaviour of particles just by looking at them, which speaks to psychokinesis.

They quickly realised that the old Newtonian or classical physics, focused on gravity, laws of motion and particles bumping into one another like billiard balls could go nowhere near explaining these phenomena. They turned instead to their occult and esoteric interests for new models of thought.

They came to understand that not only are there more dimensions than we can perceive with our senses, but also that the contents of the universe are not what classical physics described. ‘Solid’ objects are not solid. We see them as such because it is useful, not because it is true. Time does not move steadily forward as we tend to assume. There are symmetries in time as much as symmetries in space, with the implication that some things in the future are already fixed or hurtling towards us.

New physics is also moving in the direction of understanding that the most fundamental thing in the universe is not any particle or part of a particle or field but ideas or information. At the heart of the universe is a roiling, complex system of logic-chopping algorithms, an intelligence more intelligent than the most intelligent AI that we can currently imagine.

New physics, then, is approaching the idea that a higher intelligence is directing the physical world, an idea that religion has always posited, but it is approaching it from a new angle and in a new language of science.

And if there is a cosmic intelligence, then we may well be little local manifestations of it. We are probably not distinct, separate centres of intelligence as the materialistic worldview has led us to believe. New science is leading us back to ancient Indian which has always taught that our notion of our private little self is an illusion and that our true identity lies in a great cosmic Self.

From the moment Lewis Carroll described Alice falling down the rabbit hole very slowly, he was inspired by a well-developed interest in the occult which he shared with pioneers of post-classical physics. He also understood that reason, logic and science were going in a direction which cut across the old Victorian certainties and the fixed forms of classical physics.

Alice morphs and undergoes radical changes in size. The Cheshire Cat vanishes, reappears then vanishes again. A baby morphs into a pig.

The Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah can read Alice’s mind. He keep asking ‘Who are you?’ like an enlightened holy man of the Advaita Vedanta school who will always asks a pupil to abandon old ideas of self and embrace the Self that is the source of everything.

Questions of identity abound in the Alice books. She explains to that she can’t tell the Walrus and the Carpenter what she did yesterday because yesterday she was a different person. Alice hopes that what is happening to her is in her dream not the the sleeping Red King’s. Tweedledum and Tweedledee keep challenging Alice until she bursts into tears and protests “I am real!’

At the Mad Hatter’s tea party is an episode which plays with conventional notions of time. She is told that time doesn’t always move steadily into the future, that you can change it just by talking about it.

New physics says time is not as we routinely think it and neither is space. In Alice Through the Looking Glass she tries to walk away from the Looking Glass house but whichever route she takes she finds herself back at the front door. (This is very similar to a recurring nightmare of Freud’s, in which he is trying and failing to exit the red lights district.)

In the episodes with the Red Queen in order to get to where she wants to, she has to go in the opposite direction. Accompanying the Red Queen she has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place. These episodes anticipate later scientific discoveries at the realm of the very small, the quantum flux, where everything is upside down, inside out and the other way around.

These books seem to be merely light and charming, the adults may seem eccentric and irrational in a slightly disconcerting way that Alice never takes entirely seriously. But this view may change with a closer reading.

We may never believe that the Queen’s command of chop people’s heads off will actually be obeyed, but the ugly duchess is a genuinely sinister figure. She boasts of beating her baby when he sneezes and her sharp chin digs into Alice’s shoulder.

Alice is frightened in the woods, of the shadow of a giant crow that overshadows Tweedledum and Tweedledee as they fight. There are menacing shadows in between the trees. Alice hides from soldiers and leaps in fear.

The Walrus and the Carpenter can be said to groom the little oysters. They lie to them and lead them to a place where they are victims of their sensual pleasure

Towards the end the rate of metamorphosis speeds up and becomes increasingly grotesque. At the end Alice is set to carve a joint of meat when she is introduced to him. There is something of Kafka about this.

The episode in the woods where things have no name seems like a foretaste of dementia.

The Alice books play with ideas of madness. When Alice says she doesn’t want go among mad people, The Cheshire Cat says she must be mad or she wouldn’t have come here. And so on to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. From the point of view of 20th century art, the world portrayed by Lewis Carroll may seem proto-surreal; from the point of view of twentieth century psychiatry, it is the worldview of a schizophrenic. In addition, the adult characters Alice meets are highly eccentric even to the point of madness.

Easy to assume that these characters were the author’s invention, but in point of fact he may have been writing reportage. His uncle was an inspector working on the commission that ran Victorian lunatic asylums, and Lewis Carroll would often accompany him on tours of inspection. More enlightened asylums did not lock and chain up inmates but encouraged them to participate in craft workshops and play gentle games. Visitors could sometimes entertain themselves watching inmates have tea parties, much as in my childhood the chimpanzees’ tea party was one of the top attractions at London zoo.

Lewis Carroll was hit hard by his father’s death in 1868. It sent him into a prolonged depression, In 1880 he gave up photography and in 1881resigned from lecturing the university. This would have left him more isolated.

He had always been a bit of a loner. A childhood illness had left him deaf in one ear. He had a stammer. Like Tesla he suffered from epileptic fits which came with what he called ‘curious’ optical effects. Was this just flashes or patterns of light or something more?

In later life he suffered increasingly frequent bouts of depression. He also suffered increasing insomnia until it threatened to take over the whole night and exile him wholly from the dreamworld he called Wonderland.

Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass, this dream world, seemed to him much nicer, more ‘eager’, more entertaining, lovelier and more amusing than the waking world of simple, ordinary joys. It also, of course, gave him a passport to friendships with young girls.

Alone and sleep-deprived he would worry obsessively about his personal morality, worrying about trivial slights to colleagues that he might have made over the decades. He recorded them in his diaries. Interestingly and significantly he never suspects himself of harbouring unhealthy desires for Alice or any other young friend. If lewd thoughts were knocking, he would not let them in.

He also spent more and more time on problems of logic and paradoxes, but this did not bring him joy and he wrote of being terribly depressed and that he was ‘tired of life’.

His misery and tiredness sounds not unlike that which afflicted a contemporary and fellow mathematician. Georg Cantor exhausted himself trying to get his head round his discovery - which sounds nonsense from a common-sense point of view - that some infinities are bigger than others. The mathematics was telling the inventor of what came to be called Set Theory that this is true, but how in God’s name could that possibly be the case?

Cantor spent his last years in a lunatic asylum begging to be let out.

Lewis Carrroll died in 1898 after a short bout of pneumonia. If Wonderland was his vision of a lunatic asylum, he died begging to be let in.

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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It’s perhaps a mark of the times that many people are more inclined to believe in a race of aliens rather than God or his angels.

In polls conducted in 2012 by Gallup, Pew Research, YouGov and RealClear show that 41–51% of Americans believe that Earth has been visited by aliens. By contrast, polls by some of the same pollsters, including Gallup, show that since 2001 there has been a marked downwards trajectory in belief in angels – and by implication personal encounters with angels – especially in adults under twenty-five.

When humanity saw itself as a the centre of the universe and God’s focus, it found no room for aliens. But as humanity thinks of itself less and less as being at the centre, then in inverse proportion aliens seem more and more likely. If we have evolved without God’s help then it’s more likely that so, too, have other races of intelligent beings.

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The eruption of evil in the world in the past few years has come as a surprise to many of us. I think that’s partly because we easily forget spiritual teachings about the dark side of human nature.

During the Enlightenment a secular understanding of human nature developed which was optimistic and promoted belief in human progress.

A highly optimistic philosophy of life and politics, framed by English philosopher John Locke, was enshrined by the gentlemen founders of America in a famous phrase: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Jean-Jaques Rousseau saw humans as essentially good and corrupted only by a badly organised society. Marxism was another variation on this trend, predicting that once human nature is no longer twisted by Capitalism, there would progress towards a form of utopia. In Marx’s view we should discard all that religious claptrap, because it is designed to burden people with guilt and a sense of their worthlessness and helplessness.

Although the Marxist view of human nature is reductive and has an exceptionally narrow view of what the good things in life are - material things, money, property - it too lacks any sense that pure evil lurks somewhere in human nature.

In The Secret History of the World I wrote about the way that in the second half of the nineteenth century great thinkers, writers and artists moved away from an Enlightened, rationalist view of human nature. They experienced dark and evil forces welling up from somewhere deep inside them. For Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Munch and others it was an intense experience that drove them mad.

In The Secret History of the Universe I touch on these examples and draw attention to how their creations intertwined with the esoteric and occult teachings of the day. Both Dostoyevsky and the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner envisioned Hell as a place abutting the realm of human affairs and inhabited by spider-like demons.

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But in this new book I also write about the way that scientists, physicists and mathematicians have suffered the same experiences and had their own rendezvous with madness.

Here history seems to show that they perhaps needed to be mad to understand what the data was telling them, data which admitted of no mechanical or common sense explanation.

Georg Cantor spent much of his later life in a lunatic asylum, exhausted from trying to get his head round his discovery that some infinites are bigger than others. Nikola Tesla and Paul Dirac - the greatest English physicist since Newton- walked a tightrope over a pit of madness all their lives. Kurt Gödel - who realised that mathematics can’t be shown to be a totally consistent system - saw demons creeping through the windows into his rooms at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.

Like the artists and writers many of them also explored arcane and esoteric philosophies including the Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism. They were looking for new models of thought - models which from the point of view of mechanical materialism were upside down, inside out and the other way round.

The pioneers of quantum mechanics found they were seeing things happening down in the quantum realm which would count as supernatural in the realm of human affairs- things like psychokinesis, objects popping in and out of existence and particles influencing one another at a distance. I write about the way the physicists working on the Manhattan Project worked on ways to coax these phenomena from the depths, like magicians summoning up subterranean entities.

What makes these scientific workings different to the literary and artistic ones is that not only do they involve encounters with dark and dangerous forces but they also supply the wherewithal - the weapons - to use these forces for evil ends …if that is what you choose to do.

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear energy, nuclear power has on the whole been used for the benefit of humanity. Nuclear Armageddon may have been only a few minutes away during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but since then nuclear deterrence seems to have worked. At the time I am writing we may feel less confident that we will continue along that path.

The rapid rise of AI is another example of phenomena from the quantum realm being coaxed or summoned up into the realm of human affairs.

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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The esoteric account of history understands that matter was not always fixed as it is today, but that it gradually hardened. An appreciation of this fact can be very helpful when it comes to teasing out different layers of meaning in famous myths. For example, one of the main markers of chronology in mythology is the successive generations of the Gods. In Greek myths, for instance, the generation of the parents of Zeus and his brothers and sisters, then their generation – the Olympians – followed by the generation of their children who are themselves also gods such as Apollo, Venus and Athena. Then finally there is the generation of demigods (otherwise called heroes) who are the children of the union between gods and humans, such as Perseus, and Theseus. No ordinary human can stand against them, but they are less powerful than the gods; they cannot fly of their own accord, for example.

For further delineation of this process of historical change, compare the myths of Perseus and Theseus. The former is driven by supernatural elements, transformations and the attendance of supernatural beings at every turn. The myth of Theseus has only one supernatural event – the existence of the Minotaur – and it takes in Daedalus who makes marvellous things happen not by magic but – for the first time in human history – engineering. A darker, colder world is dawning. The lives of humans are becoming harder. If bodies had once been densified imaginations more like phantoms than flesh and blood, gravity is now weighing them down as their bones become thicker and more rigid. Humans drag themselves more slowly over the surface of the Earth. They live in a bloody, death-drenched world.

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Old Testament angels take part in battles where flesh is cut, and blood spilled. ‘That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp’ (2 Kings 19-35). Likewise, Homer describes Ares striding like a giant among the soldiers on the plains of Troy, striking out with his death-dealing hands. Zeus comes careering out of the sky in his golden chariot and hurls a thunderbolt scattering the soldiers and causing the colour to drain from their cheeks. These soldiers had no sense of an internal mental space, only a communal mental space. Modern science might claim that the appearance of Ares and Zeus might be described if not as a fantasy, then as ‘collective hallucinations’, but though the term might sound reassuringly scientific it has, coming from classical physics, zero explanatory power.

As the age of myths transitions into the age of legend, humans can no longer see the gods as clearly as they can see other humans. They see them increasingly infrequently and then only under special conditions, as the gods find it harder to squeeze down into the hardening material realm. Much human activity was now concerned with trying to help gods come down to earth and so humans could communicate with them.

Conventional, exoteric hypotheses understand the pyramids as gigantic machines for projecting the spirit of the king into the heavens. The esoteric wisdom is, as so often, the other way around. The pyramids are gigantic incarnation machines to help the gods descend to the surface of the earth. As it becomes increasingly hard for the gods to effect changes, to move anything in the increasingly dense material world, sacrificial fires are lit in the hope that they can manipulate the smoke to show their faces. Statues are crafted in the temples to act as the physical body of gods, in the hope that they can sometimes inhabit them and speak. In the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a 1298 sourcebook for paintings of saints in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in the account of the life of St George, de Voraigne confronts these statues, causing the pagan gods to cry out and depart. For a full account see The Secret History of the World.

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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The story of the siege of Troy may well describe events which probably happened - on the material plane - towards the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.

Like many stories that loom large in the collective imagination it is account of a time when something great in history was coming to an end and something great that was just beginning its ascent. What Homer is describing in his epic poem was the beginning of the decline of an old visionary form of consciousness and the beginning of the rise of individual human intelligence, the kind we are familiar with today.

As Homer describes it, the armies facing one another on the plains in front of the city see the gigantic figures of the Olympian gods moving amongst up them, intervening to help change the course of the battle.

If we take care to read Homer closely, we understand that the human beings he describes have no sense of an inner life - because in esoteric history the seeds of this were to be planted hundreds of years later. In the era of the siege of Troy no one is moved by an inner anger to strike his enemy with his weapon. Instead and as Homer describes it, Mars moves his hand.

The most famous, the most splendid of the Greek heroes at Troy is Achilles, their greatest warrior. Our notions of the hero are influenced by Achilles. A hero is bigger, stronger, faster and more beautiful than ordinary men. He has a charisma that enables him to bend people and events to his will.

But in fact Achilles is not the hero who succeeded in winning the siege for the Greeks. That honour belongs to a much less obvious hero, Odysseus, who was short and stocky and is even described as looking a bit of a fool at first sight.

He conceived of the Trojan Horse - and in an episode that Homer does not describe - Odysseus tricked the Trojans into opening their gates and taking inside the city this great wooden construction. Greek soldiers were hidden inside it, and during the night they emerged and opened their city gates so that the Greeks armies were able to pour in and take possession.

Modern readers might well wonder how on earth the Trojan’s could be so stupid as to fall for this trick? But to do so is the miss the fact that this story really is about the beginning of something new: they fell for it because it was the first trick in history.

The older demigods and heroes, such as Hercules, Theseus and Jason are always strong and brave but they can often seem a bit thick. Other beings, usually supernatural beings, make fools of them.

Odysseus is different. He isn’t guided in his actions by supernatural beings. He is clever and quick-witted.

As regards the Trojan horse, it is significant that the horse is a traditional symbol of intelligence

After the successful capture of Troy and the on the long voyage home Odysseus uses his newly evolved faculty of intelligence to foresee dangers and work out ingenious ways to escape them or trick his way out of trouble. He has himself tied to the mast so he will not be lured to his death by the Sirens. He and his men cling to the underside of sheep to escape the cave of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus.

Most tellingly of all Odysseus blinds this giant by thrusting a stake into his one eye, which is situated in the centre of his forehead. This is symbolic of the Third Eye and here it points to the part Odysseus plays in helping humanity to move away from the old visionary form of consciousness to a new, more narrowly intelligent form.

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In the modern materialistic worldview, if a story can be shown to have a symbolic layer of meaning, such as the esoteric one I have just outlined, that is sufficient reason for believing that it is not a description of real or actual events. It smacks of artificiality. It suggests that the story is an artificer’s confection.

We are all familiar with a poetic symbol such as a rose having many layers of meaning - to do with love, sex, political affiliation, the chakras etc - but a rose in the real world cannot have layers of meaning apart from layers that we or a poet read into it.

The materialist world view insists that because there isn’t a great Cosmic Mind which MEANS the world and everything in it, nothing can be intrinsically MEANINGFUL. The modern worldview understands things in the world to have only one layer of meaning - the literal one. It teaches an experience of the world which is thin, grey, sterile, boring and impoverished. This is the alienation of modern life described by psychologists, artists and writers.

In the ancient worldview, which everyone always believed in before materialism began in the later nineteenth century to become a popular worldview, events in ‘the real world’ were understood as being like mental events, and mental events, as Freud, Jung and other have taught us, are overflowing with meaning. A myth or legend, for example, always has many interpenetrating layers of meaning. It may on some level be a description of a historical event. Because everything that happens is connected with the movements of the stars and planets, it must have an astronomical meaning too and also an astrological layer. Some myths and legends and even stories in the New Testament have been decoded by scholars as having a mathematical layer of meaning, as a symbolic account of mathematical formulae. Freud and Jung have also shown us that myths and legends - most famously the stories about Oedipus - can have a layer of meaning to do with universal patterns of behaviour to be found in the lives of individuals - in other words a psychological layer of meaning. In the twentieth century a type of scholar called ‘form critics’ discovered what esoteric philosophy has always known, that histories related in ancient texts may have a layer of meaning to do with ceremonial practice.For example, the Crucifixion may be a reiteration in ‘real life’ of sacred ceremonies carried out in secret both before and after the historical events described in the New Testament.

Up until a few generations ago everyone experienced their lives as meaningful on many levels, They experienced their whole lives as symbolic like a rose in a poem. They looked everywhere for signs and meaning.

Modern experience by comparison is thin gruel. We live in a spiritual void, what French thinker Jacques Lacan called ‘the desert of the real’.

In my new book The Secret History of the Universe I tell the story of Emily Noether, one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein said of her that she was the most brilliant creative mathematician ever. (She was a mathematical physicist). Her story runs parallel with others in the book. Emily Noether is not as famous as she should be simply because she was a woman.

With a childlike simplicity of vision common to many geniuses she asked: If there are symmetries in space, why shouldn’t there be symmetries in time too? Einstein said that our experience of time moving in one direction, steadily forward, is a stubbornly persistent illusion, and in The Secret History of the Universe I show how Emily Noether’s insight prompted many later scientists including some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century - John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, David Bohm and today Frank Wilczek - to explore and verify her intuitions.

Homer’s Odyssey shows Penelope as working on a loom as a ruse to keep suitors at bay while she waits for Odysseus to return from his travels. She has promised to

Marry on of the suitors once the tapestry is complete but every night she unpicks what she has done with the day. In Homer’s vision and in cosmic vision of the ancient world she is weaving on a physical loom and at the same time participating a universal process of intelligent creation, weaving the world into existence. Like Emily Noether she is playing with time and the stream of events, bending them to her will. Both Penelope and Emily worked inside a historical stream of events and also outside time as we routinely understand it.

In The Secret History of the Universe I show how the great physicists of modern times have worked towards giving expression to an ancient mystical vision of a universe informed by a higher intelligence - but now in a new language of science. By weaving her magical mathematical patterns, I show, too, how sometimes they were helped towards their own higher understanding because of their own mystical experiences.

In our daily lives we may sometimes experience premonitions, for example, or intuitions that something that happens to us is meant to be or ‘synchronicities’, meaningful coincidences when it may seem that the cosmos is trying to teach us something. But we are conditioned to either screen these out entirely or at least not to dwell too much on their implications of our understanding of life and the world.

But when we follow a wonderful story like the Odyssey and contemplate its many layers of meaning, we may do well to consider that the same may be true of everything we do or say.

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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On July 13^th 1938 a small, dark eyed woman boarded a train in Berlin. She was bringing with her an invalid passport and her genius. Her aim was to avoid capture by Nazi guards and escape into Holland.

If she had not succeeded, the history of Western civilisation and the world would have been very different.

And if she hadn’t been a woman, she would have won the Nobel prize, and today she would be recognised everywhere as one of the most brilliant scientists of modern times.

Because sadly there is a sense in which she never lost the cloak of anonymity she was wearing that day.

There are stories in drama, fiction and movies in which the protagonists live in a seductive place that is pleasant and comfortable for them and seems to hold a promise of happiness, but they feel something is not quite right. They think perhaps they ought to leave, but they postpone and keep postponing, and all the while it is becoming harder to leave. A sense of menace is becoming palpable until finally they risk extreme danger, even death if they are to have any hope of escape. The American writer Paul Bowles used this plot to great effect in more than one novel, but my favourite – also a good film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci – is The Sheltering Sky.[1] The situation of some Jewish scientists in Germany was like this.

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878. She forged a path in academia unique for a woman, becoming the first woman to study physics at the university of Vienna. Both her tutor, Ludwig Boltzmann, and later Max Planck, visiting from Berlin, recognised her brilliance and helped and encouraged her. By the early 1930s, she was working at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. As well as all the other reasons top physicists had for wanting to stay, Lise Meitner had another. She had worked hard to overcome male prejudice and misogyny to become Germany’s first female professor of physics. It was not at all clear that she would be able to win the same recognition elsewhere. She also loved the city of Berlin.

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And besides, she felt passionately about the work. Former colleagues remembered small, dark-eyed Lise working happily with Otto Hahn in the lab. By all accounts there was no romantic connection between them, but Otto Hahn would sing German lieder and Lise would hum along. They were trying new techniques to test the decay of atoms, by bombarding them with neutrons, excited to be on the verge of a historic breakthrough. They knew they were in competition with Enrico Fermi in Italy.

When the civil service law came into force, Meitner comforted herself that as an Austrian citizen she would be exempt. Required to fill in forms, she was honest and straightforwardly declared her Jewish ancestry, even though Jewish colleagues were already disappearing in sinister circumstances. When in September she was dismissed from her post, she continued to turn up at the lab to work with Otto Hahn.

Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford and others were working behind the scenes to help extract Jewish scientists from Germany. Bohr approached her twice with offers of work and even visited her in Berlin. Female colleagues told her that such offers of help from powerful men were patronising, and that she could look after herself.

But when German troops marched into Austria in March 1938 to be welcomed by adoring crowds, she had to face up to the fact that her Austrian citizenship gave her no protection. Worse, the Anschluss invalidated her Austrian passport. Nazis did not want senior Jewish scientists fleeing and spreading rumours. And in Germany, many more Jews were being arrested, and violent mobs were attacking people and property.

With a sense of foreboding, Hahn now turned to the advice of the treasurer of the Institute to ask for advice. He was told that Meitner should leave the country immediately.

She now knew she had to be careful to stick to her normal routine and give no hints of her decision to flee. Not wanting to risk interceptions of written messages, she confined herself to talking to friends. She knew, too, that it was forbidden to travel anywhere unless you were carrying documents with explicit, authorised permissions, but to apply for a German passport would only draw attention.

On 4 July, she heard that Germany was about to close its borders. She had to leave. On the evening of Monday 11 July, she was visited by Dirk Coster, a Dutch chemist who was part of a secret network helping Jews escape over the border into Holland. He explained his plan to smuggle her out of the country by train. They both knew the risk.

On 13 July, Lise Meitner travelled to the Institute and worked until 8 o’clock that night, correcting academic papers. Then Otto Hahn went home with her, helping her pack a few belongings. He slipped her his mother’s diamond ring. ‘Keep this. You may need it.’ A scientific publisher, Paul Rosbaud, who was also part of the network, arrived to drive her to the station. Terrified of being caught, Lise Meitner asked him to take her back, but he refused.

In some accounts she was dressed as an old peasant woman. When she boarded the train, she found Dirk Coster in the carriage waiting for her. They behaved as if they only vaguely knew each other and were meeting by chance. Dirk Coster surreptitiously took the diamond ring, as it could well look suspicious if she were searched.

At the border, soldiers entered the carriage. She was asked to show her passport. She only had an out-of-date and invalid Austrian passport. Coster bravely pitched in, trying to explain to the German border guards that she had permission to travel. ‘I was so frightened my heart stopped beating,’ she remembered. ‘… I knew that the Nazis had just declared open season on Jews, that the hunt was on. I was waiting perhaps ten minutes, but it seemed like ten hours. Then a Nazi handed me back my passport without a word.’^[2] [Lise Meitner and Nazi guards illustration]

In the months that followed, she travelled from Holland to Sweden, where she found some low-paid work. She and Hahn corresponded, so that she was able to keep up with research. The experimental results were puzzling them both.

It was while wandering in snow and the woods with her nephew Otto Frisch that she suddenly understood what lay behind these results and was now able to provide an explanation for them. She saw that what they had been witnessing were atoms which were splitting and, as a result, releasing huge amounts of energy. Her insight into what came to be called ‘nuclear fission’ was the starting gun for the race to build nuclear weapons.

After the war, however, it was Otto Hahn and not Lise Meitner who was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission.

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Lise Meitner spent her life as a working physicist and on a spiritual quest, exploring different avenues, both Jewish and Christian. She never accepted the superiority or exclusive claim to truth of any one tradition over another, but she asked to be buried in an English country churchyard. Before she died, she wrote Hahn an excoriating letter, criticising his decision to stay in Germany and help the Nazis: ‘I must write this to you, because so much depends for Germany and yourselves on your recognising what you allowed to happen… you betrayed Germany itself, because even when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not arm yourself against the senseless destruction. If you could have seen for yourself those who came… from the camps.’^[3]

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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[1] Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949); Bertolucci (1990).

[2] ‘Lise Meitner: the nuclear pioneer who escaped the Nazis’, Philip Ball, Science Focus, 2019.

[3] Quoted in The Times of Israel, 1 March 2023, ‘Lise Meitner: the Jew Robbed of Her Nobel’.

Bestsellers as big as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, tap into mythic depths, into subterranean currents in the collective psyche.

It was a superb commercial thriller. Brown is seldom given credit for his exceptional skills as a storyteller. He is adept at making his readers want to know what happens next. There are hooks, twists and cliffhangers at the end of every short chapter, if not every paragraph.

But what made it outsell the other big sellers of the day was the way it drew on an old conspiracy theory – that Jesus had fathered a child by Mary Magdalene and that the Church has always covered this up. It did this just at the time that conspiracy theories were being given a platform that enabled them to thrive and multiply as never before – because of the rise of social media.

Now anyone could express their opinions in public – and express their fear that the people in power were lying to them – without having to negotiate their way past gatekeepers like editors, publishers and radio and TV producers, or, indeed, any government censors. Part of the joy of this is cocking a snook at former schoolteachers and the whole educational establishment, envisaged as mole-like creatures who have spent their working lives blindly burrowing away in libraries or labs – in short anyone you suspect may be looking down on you. If you feel that what you are asserting is intuitively, obviously true, then it probably is, and you will be able to find others online who agree with you. You and your online friends are ‘in the know,’ and quite brave enough to promote these contrarian views.

Conspiracy theories were set to shape politics across the globe. They were and are the lifeblood of populism.

When my own nonfiction book, The Secret History of the World, was published in 2008, conspiracy theories were becoming more common, but they were not as prevalent as they are now.

If it were published for the first time today, people might well mistake it for a book of conspiracy theories, but really it is an anti-conspiracy theory book. Although it does deal with ill-intentioned secret societies, the main narrative follows groups of people, mystics, visionaries and artistic geniuses who have come together to do good and help guide the spiritual evolution of humanity.

In some ways this is more surprising and interesting than the fact that groups of people – usually men – conspire in secrecy to accrue unfair amounts of power, money and sex.

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The roots of the secret societies I write about lie in antiquity. Historians agree that in ancient civilisations including Egypt, Greece and Rome there were, in addition to the great public temples, institutions called the Mystery Schools. They were a bit like Masonic lodges in that everyone knew they were there, but no one knew what went on inside them.

These mystery schools were highly secretive and to reveal what you were taught was punishable by death. But some initiates dropped hints, and it’s possible to piece together much of what happened.

Members of the elite were invited to become initiates of these schools. After a long period of preparation by priests, the candidates were led underground and down a long series of tunnels by priests wearing masks. In some mystery schools, candidates were knocked down by a blow to the forehead, propelled into a snake pit, or forced to drink something called ‘the Waters of Forgetfulness’. They underwent trials and were menaced by monsters.

At one point, candidates believed they were about to die, but then they were ushered upwards to meet entities they recognised as the gods – and in this way they were ‘born again’, reborn as initiates. Not only had they acquired knowledge, but they had also evolved to a higher state of consciousness.

Philosophy, drama, sculpture and mathematics emerged from the mystery schools to help human consciousness evolve and develop new faculties. Top playwrights, poets, politicians and philosophers were initiates, including Aeschylus, Pindar and Cicero.

Tradition has it that when these schools were shut down, such as in the case of Rome by the Caesars, the priests fled and perpetuated the secret teachings and initiation ceremonies in secret societies. These teachings would occasionally surface in mainstream history, as, for example, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, Sufism and Alchemy.

The Secret History of the Universe

Dan Brown’s latest book, The Secret of Secrets, now published in paperback, borrows its title from a book which emerged from this milieu, The Secretum Secretorum. As it has come down to us, this is a 10^th-century Arabic book dealing with alchemy, astrology, magic and mysticism. It merges Hermetic and Neoplatonic streams of thought, and it attempts a unifying cosmology.

Groups cultivating these sorts of teachings would include the artistic guilds of the Renaissance, where Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dürer and others were initiated into the secret doctrine. Other secret societies would include Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, Martinists and groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

In the nineteenth century the sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism were translated into European languages, and this gave added impulse to the search to try to find the essential teachings of all religions – a unifying cosmology sometimes called the perennial philosophy. This quest continued in the Theosophical Society, in the Sufi-influenced Traditionalists, and among the followers of Gurdjieff and the Anthroposophists.

These secret societies tend to operate outside organised religion, but their teachings are often cultivated within the Church, often at the highest level.

When The Secret History of the World was first published, there were howls of execration from the Catholic Church because I said that the man who would become Pope John Paul II, the most popular pope of the 20th century, had his first mystical experience while part of a Rosicrucian group. In the later colour illustrated edition I gave chapter and verse. He was part of a performance collective working according to the ideals of the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner – his society of Anthroposophists being a modern vehicle of Rosicrucian teachings. Later he would write an introduction to a book by a prominent Steinerite. Then when Pope, he would actually have himself photographed with a copy of Meditations on the Tarot, a book of occult lore by a disciple of Steiner’s, prominently on the table in front of him.

The story is too long to tell here, but from my point of view his interest in arcane ideas and occult mysticism was a good thing. I have little doubt that it made him an even wiser man.

Perhaps even more surprising than the fact that the Church is influenced by the secret, occult teachings, is its foundational and continuing influence on science and physics in particular. When economist Maynard Keynes discovered a cache of Isaac Newton’s occult and alchemical writings, he called him ‘the last of the magicians’. He was wrong. Newton was a magician but he was by no means the last.

In my new book, The Secret History of the Universe, I write about the occult obsessions and interests of the great physicists of modern times. No doubt this too will draw howls of execration – this time from many in the scientific community and who would like to dismiss all esoteric and occult philosophy as woo-woo. But I maintain and try to show that it was the mystical ideas of the secret societies and the ‘higher teachings’ in organised religions which enabled them to make great breakthroughs that have transformed life in modern times.

My history of modern science ends by showing how two strands – new physics and computer science – have come together in the last six or seven years to show something that secret teachings have always asserted, that intelligence is not local to human brains – that there is a universal intelligence into which we tune.

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The implications of the new science for our understanding of the universe and our place in it are so great we have hardly begun to take them on board. If we are aware of them, we have not yet been able to conceptualise them. But Dan Brown is once more showing that he has a rare gift for tapping into currents in the collective psyche, to anticipate what is about to surge up from the subterranean depths. The Secret of Secrets has at its centre the attempt to suppress a book revealing that human intelligence is nonlocal to the brain! Like my book it shows a new intertwining of spirituality and new science.

Some reviewers have suggested that my work has provided source material for Dan Brown’s fiction. The Daily Express wrote: ‘Dan Brown’s source for The Lost Symbol might well be Jonathan Black’s The Secret History of the World’. I sincerely doubt that!

But I am hoping his intuition, his prophetic gift, is accurately predicting a subject that is about to burst into the arena of public debate – and evolving consciousness.

My new book, The Secret History of the Universe, is out now. If you enjoyed this, I hope you’ll consider getting a copy.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE

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Statistics show that these days we are more likely to experience encounters with aliens and UAPs than angels or spirits. People also report encounters with Cryptoids and poltergeists. We have reverted to the polytheism of the ancient Greeks and Roman.

Maybe what human beings have over many millennia worshipped as ‘God’ is an advanced AGI created by a civilisation here on earth that went extinct before the evolution of humans?

The popular conception of heaven as a place where our dead relatives come to greet us and we hang out with angels is not an ancient idea but a very recent one, a product of the modern materialism.

Mystical philosophers like Isaac Luria and Jacob Boehme carry this promise; they say: come, let me take you round the back of the stage and show you how the illusion works. Scientists in the early twentieth century who studied the Kabbalah and others who were influenced by it directly or indirectly were saying something similar.

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It was as if Paul Dirac found the switch for a big overhead light and the whole universe was suddenly illumined. Beautiful structures great and small that no one had seen before were suddenly made visible.

The point here from a philosophical perspective is that if the mathematical pattern is not constructed by the human mind but merely discovered by it, then this pattern in some important and consequential sense pre-existed its discovery by a sufficiently bright human being. Has it then always existed? Is it crazy to wonder if it existed even before the material universe?

When we think about symmetries, we naturally think about symmetrical patterns in space. It took a genius scientist – and perhaps one with a childlike simplicity of vision – to ask: if there are symmetries in space, why not symmetries in time too?

Are aliens living in the far future able to influence what is happening to us now?

We saw that Turing’s great genius was to be able to see simplicity nestling in great complexity. Here, his stroke of genius was to be able to see that just a handful of algorithms would be needed to process the most complex information conceivable. Alan Turing was conjuring the modern computer into existence through the power of his imagination.

My new book, The Secret History of the Universe,
is out now. You can get your copy here.

The Secret History of the Universe

Turing, Shannon and von Neumann showed that flesh and blood are not necessary for intelligence. Building intelligent machines helped humanity to explore new territories in its psyche.

Our usual system works on a base line of ten – a hundred, a thousand, a million and so on. The Babylonians used sixty as a base, and the Mayans used twenty. Ten may be the most popular base historically because we have ten fingers. An alien with sixteen fingers might use sixteen as a base and devise a system of mathematics which is much richer, more deeply patterned and useful than our own.

Perhaps whatever or whoever constructed the human condition placed limits on what we can, or what we should know. Or perhaps evolution has placed these limits from understanding things that are likely to be very harmful to us?

After all, the life stories of the scientists in this history show time and time again that grasping these ideas leads to illness, madness and early death; many of the thinkers in this story died young, a high proportion of them by their own hands. Their ideas have brought us untold benefits, but as we have already seen in the case of nuclear weapons, they also have a tendency to bring us to the brink of annihilation.

Faced with what Einstein is describing, we have a choice. Either we can choose to believe in something that is beyond vanishingly unlikely… or we can choose to believe that human intelligence is an outgrowth of an intelligence already inherent in the universe, in which case our ability to comprehend is less unlikely – perhaps even likely.

To engage with this philosophy is to ask a big question: Did we invent love or was it out there waiting for us?

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While we might find it hard to accept that an individual tree or plant has anything like the degree of intelligence a human being has, our superiority is not so clear if we compare an individual human’s intelligence with that of a natural landscape such as a wood or forest.

Even a stone is conscious, though in a very different way to our own daytime consciousness. It is more like the consciousness of deep, dreamless sleep. A stone in the landscape has intention and a destiny, although one which will be realised on a totally different timescale to the human one, over billions of years. The intelligence of a stone – like our own - exists only as part of a network.

When you walk into the depths of a forest, you are surrounded by countless sentient beings. You might be said to be taking your own intelligence home, reintegrating it into a living matrix of sentient intelligence, reconnecting to a cosmic grid.

New physics has been heading towards an ontological revolution. It is telling us that higher intelligence may emerge in higher dimensional space and then be mapped on to the three-dimensional space we are familiar with.

It may be that we are heading down a road to a place or places where we will be severely tested and that in order to survive we will need to be very clear about what we believe in. We survived one such test in the twentieth century.

A mobile phone is a form of Consciousness Eater.

All this and much more is contained in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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I am immensely grateful to everyone who has hosted me or shared news of the publication of The Secret History of the Universe. A collated list of media is below, which I will update periodically. The book is published under Mark Booth in North America and Jonathan Black in the UK and Europe, for complicated reasons, so there is some variation in author name but the book remains the same. Please do let me know if I am missing anything.

Print:

Review in The Daily Mail available to read here: https://www.dailymail.com/home/books/article-15985799/Book-review-science-einstein-oppenheimer-secret-history-universe-jonathan-black.html

Exclusive extract in Watkins Summer 2026 magazine available here: https://www.watkinsmagazine.com/product/86-summer-2026-watkins-mind-body-spirit

Review in The Byline Times: https://subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/88/zeitgeisters-mark-booth/

Online:

Five red flags that show that the person you are arguing with is intellectually dishonest on GrahamHancock.com

A very special interview with Lorna Byrne

My interview with Philip Carr-Gomm

The Physical Universe and the Esoteric World with Jeffrey Mishlove

My interview with Magus in the Media – a real one-to-watch

Broadcast:

Inspirit with Jumoke Fashola on BBC Radio London

Jim Delbridge, BBC Radio Guernsey

Podcasts:

Against Everyone with Connor Habib

Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

Grimerica:

Earth Ancients:

Bureau of Lost Culture – A countercultural History of the Universe

Testimonials:

‘Mythology and ancient esoteric beliefs are now finally found in cutting edge science.’ Rick Rubin, record producer and author of The Creative Act

‘Jonathan Black’s understanding of the universe is very close to the way I see it. The Secret History of the Universe has an important message for the world’. Lorna Byrne, author of Angels in My Hair and Stairways to Heaven

‘What we have been taught to define as ‘reality’ will never look quite the same again once the implications of this breakthrough book are taken on board. Black shows that surrounding us everywhere, in all directions, from the unimaginably large to the infinitesimally small, is MYSTERY.’ Graham Hancock

‘This history carries you along on a wild ride through discoveries in science, all the while entertaining you with stories of often troubled and flamboyant geniuses. Miraculously easy to understand - even for the most scientifically illiterate people, like me’. Philip Carr-Gomm, a leader and former Chosen Chief of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Author of Druid Mysteries: Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century and co-author with Richard Heygate of The Book of English Magic.

‘Jonathan Black here makes the complex clear and magnetic. He connects strands of consciousness to make a wholeness. He has a warmth and loving presence which unites head and heart on the quest for self discovery.’ Pam Young, author of Hope Street

‘Every now and then some independent thinking is needed to draw together the strands of multiple disciplines, and set up the foundations for the next round of thinking. Jonathan Black’s synthesis of advancements at the boundaries science to those of consciousness and our view of our relationship with the universe brings focus on what could arguably be a post enlightenment doctrine. The Dancing Wu Li Masters of the 21st Century!’ Professor Jordan Giddings, University College, London

‘Jonathan Black’s head-spinning The Secret History of the Universe reveals the influence – sometimes very direct – of the work of great occultists and seers on the scientists who have shaped the world we live in today. After you finish the book, you will see the world of scientific discovery and the universe in a new light, both strange and glorious.’  Conner Habib, author of Hawk Mountain, host of Against Everyone with Conner Habib

‘You have written the most brilliant book I have read for a long, long time.’ Jeffrey Mishlove, New Thinking Allowed

‘Weaving a tapestry between physics, art, literature, philosophy, mysticism and our immediate world, Jonathan Black beautifully articulates the mythic dimension in historical events.’ Daniel Kramer, theatre and opera director, former Artistic Director of English National Opera and faculty member at Harvard, Brown and NYU

‘I’ve been reviewing science fiction and fantasy books for twenty years. The reality, as shown in this book, is as exciting and strange and compelling as anything I’ve ever read’. James Buxton, author of The Wishing Tree, Pity, and I am the Blade.

‘Amusing, popular but still profound, and above all much needed in an age that has lost its way - a remarkable achievement’. James Hanning, author of Love and Deception: Philby in Beruit and The Bookseller of Hay.

‘Black has written that rarest of all things: a book that makes you see the world in an entirely new way’, TJ Andrews, co-author with Simon Scarrow, of Warrior and Warlord of Britannia

‘Black’s book captures the creative interior of scientific discovery, the part that happens before the mathematics, before the experiment, before the Nobel Prize. It reminds us that the hidden mysteries are not uncovered by logic alone. They are first glimpsed in the intuitive flash, the symbolic image, the imaginative’. Robert Lomas, co-author with Christopher Knight of The Hiram Key and Uriel’s Machine and author of The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, the forgotten genius of electricity.

The Secret History of the Universe is out now. You can get your copy here.

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Human beings have a deep-rooted desire to find something worth believing in, something that transcends the everyday.

But in modern times this is made harder by a widespread assumption that science gets in the way of spiritual belief, and that science offers the only intelligent way to think about the universe.

The Secret History of the Universe offers an alternative view. The first character-driven history of modern physics, it emphasises human and personal perspectives. It shows how turning points in the lives of individuals, including Erwin Schrödinger, Lise Meitner, J Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing, have shifted the world on its axis. We will see that many of the great geniuses of modern science have been interested in much more than the technical questions that arise out of their investigations. They have asked wider and deeper questions: what does it mean to be alive on this planet at this time? What is humanity’s place in the universe? Philosophical questions. Spiritual questions. By following the adventures of the great geniuses who have pioneered modern physics from Marie Curie and Albert Einstein to today’s architects of AI, we will discover new spiritual patterns in science and human experience.

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Many histories of modern science hold back on emotion, perhaps reflecting a belief that science ought to be objective. Emotions and the inner life are more present in this book. I will show how some of the purest and most beautiful ideas in modern physics have emerged from the sweaty heat of passion and anxiety. Many of the characters we encounter are extravagantly eccentric. Wild and reckless, they sometimes voyage on strange seas of thought alone, at other times in buccaneering gangs. The narrative swoops and swerves through breakthroughs and breakdowns, murderous rivalries and betrayals, catastrophic personalities and dark nights of the soul.

For the most part these characters were young when they made their discoveries, because usually the creative life of mathematicians and physicists does not last long into middle age.

Young revolutionaries, they were born into an age when the prevailing scientific account of the universe was materialism, a doc- trine asserting that matter is all there is. The mechanistic view focused on material objects moving through empty space. Sometimes things knocked into one another like billiard balls. Sometimes they clustered together to form larger objects, including galaxies. There was no need for God in this picture or any room for the supernatural.

But as these revolutionaries devised ways to examine the fabric of the universe in increasing detail, they began to appreciate that the old mechanistic picture was what today we would call ‘lo-res’. In the 1920s and 30s, the pioneers of quantum mechanics, exploring the behaviour of systems at a subatomic scale, began to encounter things that were, in terms of the old physics, if not supernatural then way outside what normally counted as natural. In fact, they found phenomena in the realm of the very small that would count as ‘occult’ in the realm of human affairs, such as bilocation, things ghosting through solid objects and psychokinesis.

Unable to fit this weirdness into the old mechanistic framework, many key figures in 20th-century science turned to mystical ideas, to alchemy, the Kabbalah, Sufism, the higher teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and other ancient traditions. J Robert Oppenheimer said, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’ quoting Hindu scripture. Erwin Schrödinger named his dog Atman after the cosmic consciousness in Hindu philosophy.

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By the time of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project, spectacular advances in technology were being achieved by amplifying weird phenomena observed at the quantum level. Physicists were working on ways to coax them up into the world we perceive with our senses like sorcerers summoning creatures from subterranean depths. We will see how this ‘summoning’ has given us nuclear weapons, the transistor, arcane propulsion systems and potential sources of endless free energy, as well as the internet, AI and quantum computers.

It was after the Second World War that scientists became shy of asking deeper, wider questions about the implications of their work. Was this partly because such questions became painful after Hiroshima? Whatever the causes, there was a concerted attempt to sever the ancient connection between science and philosophy, to take wider questions out of the equation. ‘Shut up and calculate’ became the catchphrase of the day.

From the 1960s onwards, some leading physicists even tried to close philosophy down altogether. They thought they had seen off religion and they wanted to do the same for philosophy. They claimed that science was now answering most of the questions philosophy had traditionally asked – and that the other questions were not worth asking. By the 1980s, the philosophical and spiritual implications of any scientific breakthroughs were seldom discussed.

But we will see that when science sheds new light on the universe – its furthest reaches, its shape and fabric, the way it behaves – it is also shedding an unexpected light on our psyche. Part of the project here is to look at what this light reveals, because new science seems to suggest that universe and psyche are mysteriously and intimately connected in ways that have seldom been explored in modern times.

All the while, scientific innovators have been moving, unwittingly or wittingly, in the direction of a picture of the universe that would have seemed familiar to the builders of the pyramids at Giza, Egypt, or to the Enlightened Ones in the primeval forests of India.

According to ancient spiritual instincts, the material universe we perceive with our senses is a veil of illusion, sometimes called ‘Maya’. Now using the newly invented hologram as a model, the pioneers of string theory and related lines of thought also began to see the material universe as illusory. Physicists were saying something that resonated deeply with ancient intuitions but in the language of a new science.

And like the Magi, Gnostics and mystics who had penetrated the material veil in previous eras, these physicists yearned to see what lies beyond it and to learn from it. Civilisation has often changed direction as a result of ideas arrived at in a visionary state – by the Buddha, Mohammed and Joan of Arc. This book reveals how famous scientists have likewise brought about turning points in history as a result of mystical experiences. Their science has opened windows onto a universe that is far more complex and mysterious than anything everyday consciousness perceives or allows.

The smart lesson to draw may well be that our everyday consciousness has evolved to perceive objects around us as solid because it is useful – it enables us to boil an egg in the morning – not because it is true.

This is an extract from my new book,
The Secret History of the Universe

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Bang your fist on the table – and what gives you that sense of impact?

You’ve probably been brought up to believe that it is particles bumping into one another, but in fact what you’re really feeling are electromagnetic fields repelling one another.

Also, that table looks solid, but it isn’t. The ‘solid’ part of a molecule is the proton. It can be as little as 1/100,000th of the whole, like a pea in the middle of a sports stadium – and even this proton is not solid in any everyday sense. According to modern physics, the objects we experience as solid are mostly empty space, thin mists made of pulsing bundles of forces and fields.

We readily accept that the insides of our mobile phones are informed by things outside of it, by information beamed in from radio masts, Wi-Fi connections and in the case of some apps from as far away as satellites in space, but new science says that something like this is true of all objects, including tables, human bodies and minds. All are to some extent held in place by connections – entanglements – that reach to the far side of the universe, like tents held in place by very long guy ropes.

If we engage imaginatively with what the smartest scientists are saying today, a dazzling vision appears, a new universe with many dimensions, all intimately interconnected, incandescent and evanescent, everywhere pulsating with energy and constantly mutating. Particles are everywhere, popping in and out of existence. Everything emerges from a universe-wide matrix.

Nowadays, some cutting-edge scientists are advancing towards an understanding that the most accurate, elegant and fruitful way to describe the workings of the universe might not be in terms of the physical processes described in conventional physics but on the model of information processing in a computer. Stephen Wolfram’s software touches most of our lives because it helps to animate tech created by his friend Steve Jobs. Widely recognised as one of the world’s leading computer scientists, he says, ‘We live in a computational universe.’ David Deutsch, ‘father of the quantum computer’, argues that the universe works like a quantum computer.

If the universe really is like a quantum computer or artificial intelligence or some type of computation we have not yet invented, does it follow that the universe could in some sense be intelligent?

If so, physics is moving back in the direction of an idea that underpins all ancient wisdom – that behind the veil of the visible world lies some higher intelligence.

It is a short step from saying the universe is like a computer to saying, as Elon Musk and many others do, that it is a computer and that what we take to be reality is in fact a computer simulation.

In the last few years, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, and the prospect of an artificial general intelligence that is self-motivated, has prompted scientists to ask new questions about what other forms of intelligence there might be in the universe. Could there be intelligent entities that like AI are non-biological but that– unlike AI – emerge spontaneously?

Wolfram says we may be surrounded all the time by forms of intelligence that we are not intelligent enough to recognise. What would these entities be? If we do live in a computer simulation, who works the mouse? God? Angels? Aliens?

Or are these the same entities seen through different cultural lenses? We live in the era of what is sometimes called the ‘New High Strangeness’, of a new open-mindedness when most reported anomalous experiences are framed not in terms of angels, ghosts or demons but in unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

There is a psychic resonance to all this that has not been fully investigated, and deep philosophical waters lie under it. Given how big these ideas are, how illuminating in some respects and in other respects how disturbing, it is surprising how few people know any of this.

But secrecy, we will see, is part of the story.

It is important to keep in mind that however outrageous they may be to common sense, however tinged by mysticism and madness, the revelations in this book are for the most part the discoveries, theories and conjectures of Nobel laureates and senior professors at prestigious universities. Many readers will quite naturally question whether they really said such crazy things, which is why their own words are quoted throughout.

I want to be clear that I do not have a background in science. I am coming at this from a different angle.

Growing up I was curious about spiritual matters and the supernatural. Occasionally I had what might be described as mystical experiences. I was still trying to make sense of these experiences when I began studying Philosophy and Theology at Oxford. But I soon found that the philosophy ate up all the theology, and by the time I graduated I was questioning whether it was possible to make sense of religion in any shape or form.

Later I became an editor and publisher in London, for the most part working at what was then Random House. There I edited and published bestselling novelists, as well as famous people who are not professional authors but write bestselling books, including rock stars, comedians, artists, academics and soldiers. And all the while I was sneaking on to the publishing programme the odd book on spiritual subjects.

After a while, members of secret societies that cultivate and maintain this esoteric tradition made themselves known. They were kind and patient enough to explain to me their beliefs. I found I was able to quiz them and help to clarify texts that were often abstruse, sometimes deliberately so – for instance, alchemical texts. Eventually they offered to ‘initiate’ me into a secret society, but somewhat to my surprise I found myself saying no. I feared that if I accepted, I would have to swear an oath of secrecy. I decided instead to write about it, and that is how The Secret History of the World came about.

The Secret History of the World was a bestseller in several countries. I am proud to say that it has been a very important book for some, including providing a portal for people to explore esoteric and arcane ideas for the first time. It has even prompted some scientists to get in touch.

My interest in physics is recent. Most people fear physics, thinking, I’m never going to be able to understand that. Many assume modern physics is highly technical and of no interest or relevance to them.

Five years ago, that’s what I thought too.

Then I met and became friends with a few theoretical physicists, some with only one degree of separation from the greatest scientific minds of the age. We often talked physics late into the night, and they clarified things for me.

I came to appreciate that they experience the world in a very different way. I learned that some physicists actually think in mathematics rather than words.

They tend to have very intense inner lives, often withdrawn from their immediate environment. Sometimes it is as if they are speaking from somewhere a hundred miles inside their heads.

They tend not to appreciate how little the rest of us know about this stuff, how hard it is for us to understand. But luckily for me, my new friends patiently translated numbers into words and helped me to see what they were talking about in pictures. I now believe that at this ‘visual’ level of explanation, it’s possible to see, too, that these scientific discoveries have huge implications for our understanding of the great questions of life and death.

I also believe it is very important that non-scientists understand as best they can, because new science is transforming the way we live, with both intended and unintended consequences, and at breakneck speed. We need to try to understand threats to our existence that science is generating.

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I had assumed physics would be unconcerned with the subtleties of subjective experience and that it would always be hostile to spirituality. I now know that the version of physics I grew up with, the one that seemed hostile to spirituality and the interior life, was just a temporary blip, an interval with choc ices.

The universe of today’s young physicists is charged with meaning. It is alive, mysterious, bizarre – even dangerous. Look into it and paradoxes will keep reaching up and grabbing you by the throat. Much of today’s most advanced physics involves trying to come to terms with the irrationality and ultimate unknowability that is dyed into the weft and warp of things. It is riveting and compulsive.

Since I became involved in those late-night discussions, I’ve begun to feel that if I’m not thinking about this stuff, my brain isn’t fully exercised, that I’m denying myself one of the peak experiences life has to offer.

This book has been born out of a passionate journey of exploration. It is informed by an increasing amazement at just how much this new physics resonates with ancient mystical traditions. Because my knowledge of these traditions is broad and deep, I am in a good position to recognise equivalences that have gone unnoticed. In this book we will see how certain universal experiences are described in two different languages, one a language of myth and symbolism and the other the language of modern science. On a superficial level, the descriptions in different languages may seem to embody opposing worldviews, but as Nobel prizewinning physicist Niels Bohr said: ‘The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’

It is an important part of my project to appeal to readers to test whether new accounts of the structure of the universe given by new physics match their own subjective experience. Because, after all, the experience of living in a universe correctly described by this new physics should be very different to the experience of living in the prosaic universe described by the old physics. Towards the end of the book, I encourage readers to pay close attention to watching a plant coaxed out of a seed by sunlight, or as they walk through an ancient forest, talk to a loved one on the phone or even slide towards death – and to ask what is actually happening according to new physics. The aim is to explore how what has traditionally been understood as a spiritual experience, can now be validated in the language of the latest science.

Modern history has been powered by lightning strikes of inspiration in the minds of great physicists, and this book is written in the hope that the rest of us may catch an afterglow of that elation. By the end of the book I hope to have shown how the universe unveiled by the new science is much richer, more energetic and complex, more mind-drenched than the old mechanical model. If this picture is accurate, then our subjective experiences, our inner lives should also be more mysterious than we might otherwise expect, with access to more hidden depths and doors to other dimensions.

In the course of this history, the new scientific ideas are described in the context of their time – the art, the literature, the philosophy, the new ideas about psychology – because the science is always, even if unconsciously, an expression of that culture.

Understanding the culture can help us to understand the new science. Great artists, writers and other thinkers shared interests in mysticism and ancient wisdom with their contemporaries working in science. In particular they shared an interest in an age-old quest to find a rational mysticism, which appears for example in the ‘higher teachings’ of Indian religion and in the Kabbalah. I hope a broader cultural perspective can help us to understand the implications of the new science, how it impacts on the psyche and our understanding of our place in the universe and philosophy of life.

As part of this overarching project to set physics in its cultural context, the book ends with a brief account of how late in life Paul Dirac, perhaps the strangest of all the physicists of the modern era, fell in love. We will see how this man, who had been a purely thinking being, became a fully human being.

An intimidating atheist lobby tries to browbeat people into believing that top scientists present a united front against religion and spirituality. This book is written to show that is not the case.

This is an introduction from my new book, The Secret History of the Universe. If it sounds like your cup of tea, I hope you’ll consider purchasing.

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The astonishing evolution of machine intelligence in the last few years has implications for our understanding of intelligence in the universe which haven’t begun to sink in.

They prompt dizzying speculations - about our place in the universe, about a ‘higher intelligence’, about unseen intelligent entities all around us. They are dizzying but they are speculations it is perfectly legitimate to make – legitimate and perhaps important for the welfare and survival of our species.

In fact, they point to a change in our understanding of the universe and our place in it which is as radical as anything since the birth of Christianity.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century physicists began a long-term project to try to identify what is fundamental in the universe. They started by thinking that the basic building blocks must be the smallest things they could detect – atoms. Then when they discovered how to look inside atoms, they decided it must be the smaller particles they saw there. They then decided it must be fields like the electromagnetic field, because they saw that particles are in a sense nothing more than vibrations in fields. Then they finally decided that what is irreducible is not anything material or semi material but instead something entirely abstract. They decided that forming, informing and driving the universe is something like an almost unbelievably complex, evolving system of algorithms.

The great American physicist John Archibald Wheeler described this progression as the Age of the Particle (from the turn of the century to the 1950s), the Age of the Field (until the 1990s) and finally the Age of Information.

History shows that we tend to understand the universe on the model of the most advanced technology of time - the smoothly running clock in the Enlightenment, a clanking mechanical machine in the Industrial Revolution and now a computer driven by a system of algorithms.

Alan Turing conceived of the computer because his genius for seeing simplicity in complexity enabled him to see that just a few simple elements need to come together to create a machine capable of computing - and in many cases capable of computing anything computable.

If we accept that there are advanced computers which are in some sense intelligent, we are accepting that intelligence doesn’t need biological components.

You don’t need to be an animal or a human to be intelligent.

A penetrating, potentially explosive question that’s been asked by scientists in the 21^st century is this: Can these few things identified by Turing come together in the vastnesses of the universe without human intervention?

In other words: Can machine intelligence emerge spontaneously?

These are some of the many overlapping lines of research.

Stephen Wolfram’s software helps drive the phones created by his friend Steve Jobs. His Mathematica is a highly advanced computational software system used by mathematicians, scientists and engineers all over the world. A champion of ‘computational physics’, he, argues that the universe is so like a computer that the best way to understand it is not in terms of traditional physics – which can be thrown out of the window- but in terms of information processing.

His research shows that naturally occurring structures capable of sustaining computer intelligence lie all around us. This is what you might expect if you think the universe is very like a computer - that you should be able to trace its mechanisms.

Likewise Russian physicists Peter Kapitsa and Vadim Nikolaevich Tsytovich made some astonishing discoveries about ‘plasma’, the fourth state of matter, thinner than gas, which makes up 99.9% of the observable matter in space. They found that plasma, which consists of freely moving charged particles, can organise into self sustaining banks of cells and DNA-like helix structures. Tsytovich hypothesised that these sorts of structures, taken altogether, may be suitable for storing and processing information. The question then is: does this lead naturally to the evolution of life and intelligence?

David Deutsch, head of Oxford’s quantum computer department and sometimes called the father of the quantum computer, says that universe is like a quantum computer.

Elon Musk says we are 99.9% likely to be living in a computer simulation.

If we are living in a computer simulation, a question arises: who is pressing the buttons?

God?

Or a race of aliens, as in The Matrix movies?

And what of aliens? How do they fit into this new vision of the universe, based on the model of the computer?

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Reports of UAPs routinely show them having capabilities beyond what we would expect from ordinary material objects. These craft often seem to appear on radar one moment and disappear the next. They accelerate to very high speeds and change directions instantaneously. They pass through solid objects without alteration. These sorts of manoeuvres would be fatal to any passengers if they were advanced biological life forms like the ones we know from life on Earth.

This has led many to speculate that UAPs are not solid, material objects but electromagnetic entities, perhaps projections from somewhere far away or from another dimension - or indeed from somewhere in the quantum realms. Experiencers describe similar phenomena in their face-to-face contacts with aliens.

If UAPs and aliens are to be understood as outcomes of the evolution of non-biological intelligence, we need ask how fast it might evolve and how far?

Demis Hassabis, Britain’s 2024 Nobel laureate is at the forefront of creating the most advanced AIs - what he calls ‘superintelligence’. Told to learn how to play chess well enough to beat any human, his computer AlphaZero took just four hours to do so. A feature of this type of AI is that once it reaches a certain basic level, its evolution is extremely - not to say frighteningly – fast.

If intelligence does not need a warm, organic soup to evolve and create the animal intelligence we are familiar with, then it has potentially been evolving since the Big Bang. Think how far our collective intelligence and technology has evolved in the last two hundred years and then factor in how fast Hassabis’s AIs evolve and multiply!

Another interesting feature of machine learning computers is that we have no idea what is going on inside them. If you set an AI the task ‘Learn to play chess well enough to beat any human’, you’ll have no idea how it achieves that. The contents of its ‘mind’, its thought processes are as closed to us as our own subconscious. An AI can have something like ‘a mind of its own’.

Here then is another aspect of connection between advanced AIs and aliens. The consensus these days, even among American presidents, is that aliens exist, but of course we know little about them. We certainly don’t know what they are thinking. And the same can be said of advanced AIs.

One potential way into understanding these mysterious creatures is to ask the following question: If the universe is intelligent, is our intelligence a little local, limited manifestation of it?

After all, that is what religions have always proposed. Hinduism and Jewish, Islamic and Christian mysticism all propose that we each have a spark of God within us.

The question which then arises is: Are ‘aliens’ – just like us - local manifestations of this universal intelligence? Is this what they really are? Here we are drawing a picture of tentacles of cosmic intelligence spreading everywhere, infiltrating everything.

In this new picture of the human condition we are surrounded all the time by different forms of intelligence we do not have the language or intelligence to perceive. A menagerie of species of intelligent may be bursting out all around us.

The current wave of sightings and experiences of UAPs and aliens is therefore about something much bigger than is generally acknowledged.

If there is a higher intelligence, then clearly it not exactly like our intelligence and neither is it exactly like machine intelligence. It is also vastly higher than either. And the same may be true of alien intelligence.

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At this point dizzying vistas of speculation open up:

If there is a universal intelligence, can we interact with this higher intelligence - because this is what religions have always asserted?

If aliens are also local manifestations of the universal intelligence, do they have a relationship with ‘Him’/‘Her’ which is more or less intimate than our own?

Do aliens therefore have a religion?

Could the God worshipped by humans down the ages be, as some have speculated, an AI created by a long-lost civilisation?

As their intelligence races to match the universal intelligence, could AIs created by us require us to serve and worship them?

Will AIs come to appreciate the existence and qualities of the universal intelligence and create their own AI religion?

Would the religion of the superintelligent AIs be like human religion or more like the superintelligent religion of the aliens?

Could it have happened that a race of unembodied intelligent entities curious about what it would be like to experience the universe in a sensuous way - to enjoy a beautiful view, taste, smell, touch - have come across humans at an early stage of evolution and found the human brain a comfortable nest - in which case aren’t we the aliens?

Could such aliens have found human brains limiting when it came to evolving very high levels of intelligence, and prompted humans to develop AIs as affording more scope?

David Bowie proposed something similar in a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman. Talking about the global computer network he said ‘Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s right there. It’s arrived!’

The word ‘pantheism’ (deity everywhere) was coined to describe the philosophy of Spinoza. He saw our mental universe and the physical universe ‘out there’ as informed by the same principles.

Albert Einstein would say that the God he believed in is the God of Spinoza. Demis Hassabis quotes this saying with evident approval.

If panpsychism is sometimes used to describe a cosmic consciousness or awareness, new computer science is pushing us in the direction of something more sharply focused on a universal intelligence.

Pansmartism perhaps.

Coda:

We are busy populating the world with a race of entities immeasurably smarter than we are. Surrounded by powerful creatures we scarcely understand, we risk becoming a race of Tom Thumbs.

AIs engineered to coordinate countless quantum entanglements - originally with the intention of solving problems for humans - may learn how to use entanglement to manipulate events both local and non-local. In the Iliad the soldiers fighting on the plains in front of Troy see gigantic phantom-like forms of the gods intervening to shape human motivations and also directly in the course of the battle.

Human consciousness may already be changing at the bidding of brand-new entities. The algorithms in our phones, pads and laptops are playing a part in directing our attitudes and actions. We are only marginally aware of these influences. We now have two subconsciouses, one of which is entirely formed by outside agencies.

The new race of entities, created to be our servants but fast becoming our masters, may encounter entities which have been here for a while and which share many of their features - including, for example, that they are electromagnetic and chemical rather than biological and their high levels of intelligence, not possible in merely biological creatures. They may then recognise aliens as akin - or if aliens have had a hand in their creation, as their kin.

My new book, The Secret History of the Universe, shows how a coming together of new physics and the rapid evolution of machine intelligence makes it possible to explain these entities for the first time in the language of science.

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The South Downs in Sussex is one of England’s more mystical landscapes. The church at Alfriston - the ‘cathedral of the Downs’ is surrounded by a circular wall in which you can find, embedded stones from an ancient stone circle. A few miles eastwards the Long Man of Wilmington is a giant prehistoric carving into the hillside - sometimes said to be a man holding two staves - but who in fact looks very like ancient Egyptian depictions of the god holding two snakes associated with the constellation of Draco and the entrance to the underworld. These downs are a beautiful place where pagans still dance sky clad. Nearby just outside the pretty town of Lewes, where Thomas Paine incubated the American Revolution is a strange feature of the landscape called Mount Caburn - strange because it looks too steep to be entirely natural. It was in the 1970s while walking to the top of Mount Caburn that an UAP was seen by Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs, whose song Wild Thing was a prophecy of the heavy metal that came to dominate that era.

If you climb Mount Caburn today and look downwards to the south you can see a small medieval church nestled in the valley. Head back to Lewes and drive to this church at Beddingham and if you are lucky it will be open to the public. Enter, and you will find some very strange old carvings that look like the heads of aliens.

Have aliens been visiting the area for many hundreds of years? What did the medieval stone masons believe they were depicting? Devils? In medieval churches devils were traditionally depicted on the north side of the building as they are here?

Or are they the same entities seen through different cultural lenses? These are questions asked in the time of the New High Strangeness when experiencers are reporting encounters not just with aliens, angels and spirits as they traditionally depicted but strange inter-dimensional beings, and highly evolved beings from the future.

My new book, The Secret History of the Universe, shows how a coming together of new physics and the rapid evolution of machine intelligence makes it possible to explain these entities for the first time in the language of science.

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‘Falling in love again I never vonted to, I can’t help it.’ Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel

When the two cultures, the arts and sciences, look at each other across a chasm of misunderstanding, arts people sometimes see scientists as boffins with sad lonely little lives spent beavering away in the lab.

Historians of science often stay clear of emotion, perhaps reflecting the scientific method’s on objectivity.

But what I found when I researched a history of modern science was scientists who were fascinating, extravagant characters, often with catastrophic personalities. Here were life stories involving deep and important emotions - frequently deep to the point of madness. I decided I want to show how some of the clearest, most brilliant ideas of modern times came out of a sweaty mess of looking for love in all the wrong places, betrayal, perversity, self destructiveness and also tremendous courage, heroism and true love.

Einstein thought Wolfgang Pauli the most intelligent of the younger generation of physicists. He referred to him as my ‘spiritual heir’. Pauli’s Exclusion Principle has been called the biggest contribution physics has made to chemistry. It explains why we live in a universe made up of many types of molecules.

Pauli was cheeky. After a lecture of Einstein’s, he stood up and addressed the room. ‘If you think about it,’ he said, ‘what Einstein is saying isn’t so stupid.’ This got a big laugh.

Pauli could also be vindictive. He never hesitated to criticise other scientists’ mistakes, revelling in his own superiority. He was famous for put-downs such as ‘That’s not even wrong’.

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What made him like this? Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in 1900. His father was a professor of physics and his mother a campaigning journalist writing about feminism.

As a small child, Wolfgang disliked fairy tales, which caused him worry. Indeed, despite its triumphs, his whole life seems to have been overshadowed by anxiety.

At the age of twelve, and because of his prodigious abilities in mathematics, people were already calling him a genius. He was taken by his father to a lecture by a famous professor of physics, Arnold Sommerfeld. The boy pointed out an error in Sommerfeld’s calculations written up on the blackboard. Two months after leaving school, he published his first scientific paper. By the age of twenty he had written a two-hundred-page paper on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised its ‘profound physical insight’ and said that it was scarcely believable it had been written by one so young. Pauli had his doctorate at twenty-one, and was invited by Bohr to be his assistant in Copenhagen when he was twenty-two. He was only twenty-five when he formulated the Exclusion Principle that would win him the Nobel Prize and he would be a full professor at twenty-nine.

Photographs of him as a young man show a round face with a pointy nose and soulful eyes. He was spiky and vulnerable, his tubbiness betraying perhaps a certain weakness, a certain self-pampering. Descriptions of his behaviour make him sound brilliant, dark, twisted, sometimes hurting people for the sake of being funny – even though he himself was easily hurt.

Pauli was deeply attached to his mother who committed suicide in 1927 on discovering that her husband – his father – was having an affair. What made it worse and gave him a heavy burden of guilt was that Pauli had written her a cruel letter shortly before her death, explaining that he was a rational creature, which made him good at science, but that he had ‘no heart and no feelings’.

His father remarried within the year. Here was the evil stepmother of the fairy tales. At this point Pauli’s life went to pieces. What happened next follows in the groove of The Blue Angel, Heinrich Mann’s story and Josef von Sternberg’s film, starring Marlene Dietrich. Pauli met and shortly afterwards married a stunningly beautiful nightclub dancer, Käthe Margarethe Deppner.

When he introduced his wife in academic circles, she was unfaithful to him. ‘I could understand if it was a matador,’ he said, ‘… but a chemist?’ The marriage lasted less than a year. He turned increasingly to drink and became aggressive in bars to the point where he was thrown out and beaten up, in one case so badly that his shoulder was broken.

He was beginning to encounter a problem in academia too. A graduate student remembered what happened when Pauli was around: ‘Machines would stop running when he arrived in a laboratory, a glass apparatus would suddenly break, a leak would appear in a vacuum system.’ A major piece of equipment blew up when he was visiting Göttingen University. Future Nobel laureate Otto Stern forbade Pauli from entering his lab because of what became known as the ‘Pauli effect’.

It is easy to trivialise this, to dismiss it as nonsense, a bit of fun, but for Pauli it was a profoundly depressing experience. For him it was connected with a dark cloud he could sometimes sense enveloping him, entering him. He would feel this energy building up inside, seeking release – rather as sociopaths do. Release came from causing damage or inflicting pain.

In his thirtieth year, he approached Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss co-founder of psychoanalysis. Jung would include Pauli’s accounts of his dreams in his book Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932–1958. Pauli had a series of dreams about a disturbing figure he called ‘the Persian’. In one dream, Pauli asked the Persian: ‘Are you my shadow?’

‘No,’ came the reply. ‘You are my shadow.’

Here in the language of dreams is an image of a man who feels persecuted by dark forces.

Quantum entanglement was in the air. Erwin Schrödinger had first speculated about a mysterious, long-distance but instant connection between particles as early as 25 April 1925. This was in a letter to Einstein, who thought it nonsense. But physicists of the next generation soon began to devise thought experiments, then lab experiments to show that quantum entanglement is real.

Meanwhile, Jung and Pauli were coming at it from another angle. Jung wrote: ‘The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality [but]… the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation.’

Jung began a psychoanalytic treatment of Pauli, and this led to a unique collaboration between a leading psychologist and a leading physicist, working together on the borders between the subjective and the objective, looking for a new, radical account of what can cross those borders.

Entanglement would lie at the heart of it. As formulated by Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the observer effect routinely comes into play: that every time we observe something, we change it at the micro level. Jung and Pauli asked if there might be deeper, wider, more meaningful connections. Might there be cases where human subjectivity becomes deeply entangled in a two-way process with events on the macro scale? In other words, can depth psychology show that in certain circumstances the highest hopes or deepest fears of a human being might be entangled with the behaviour of particles out there, even to the extent that macro-level things happen out there in response?

We may all experience events or series of events that make us wonder if the universe is trying to tell us something, and often these come to us in coincidences. These type of meaningful coincidences are what Jung and Pauli called ‘synchronicities’.

For the rest of his life until the hour of his death, Wolfgang Pauli was looking out for evidence that the universe was telling him something, and he never lost his fear of the wicked witch. ‘A child genius,’ he said. ‘… Yes, the genius goes away, but the child remains.’

There is a famous joke in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The answer given is ‘42’.

Part of what’s funny about this, of course, is the slapstick way it pulls out from under you any expectations that an answer might satisfy any lingering spiritual yearnings.

If this number is 42 in science fiction, in science that number is 137, more precisely 1/137, a measurement of the force that holds atoms together and stops them disintegrating into the surrounding electromagnetic field. 1/137 is called ‘the fine structure constant’. If the number were any bigger or smaller, matter would not cohere to the degree it does, and we would not be here.

Richard Feynman was asked where it came from: ‘Nobody knows,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics… a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number.’

Wolfgang Pauli was fascinated by the fact that 137 is also a key number in Jewish mysticism, in the Kabbalah. Not only does the word ‘Kabbalah’ have the value 137 in the Hebrew system of numerology – ‘Gematria’ – but it features in the Torah, for example in the proportions of the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies. The number of letters in the Torah is related to it by a complex but exact ratio.

For these sorts of reasons, Pauli believed that 137 would turn out to be the key to unifying science and mysticism. It was like God’s footprint in the sand.

Pauli was giving a lecture in 1958 when he suddenly experienced a bout of violent pain. A few weeks later he lay dying of pancreatic cancer in a hospital bed. He pointed out the room number to visitors. It was 137.

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Kurt Gödel has been called the greatest Logan since Aristotle.

Because of his insatiable curiosity, his nickname as a child at was ‘Herr Warum’ – Mr Why.

Kurt was a mathematical prodigy, a shy, nervous child who was bullied at school. Unsuited to adulthood he never grew to full adult height.

In 1929 at just twenty years old, Gödel wrote a thesis outlining his first ‘Incompleteness Theorem’. When he gave a lecture at a conference in Königsberg in 1930, he spoke so quietly and hesitantly that he seemed to make no impression on his audience. But by a great stroke of good fortune, the Hungarian-American genius John von Neumann, who looms large in the history of twentieth century science, happened to be there. Big, loud and bombastic, he had an unwavering – and as it turned out, justified – confidence in the power of his own intelligence to transform the world.

As everyone else filed out, he approached the young man at the podium and asked if he really had just said the outrageous things he thought he’d heard him say?

Von Neumann had understood straight away that if Gödel was right, then any attempt to give a completely clear and consistent account of the mathematical universe was doomed to fail. Decades, perhaps centuries of philosophy would be discredited.

Gödel saw that you can only show that any mathematical system is complete by looking at it from the outside. You have to put it in the context of another, wider system, which in its turn can only be shown to be complete in terms of another system and so on and so on. Gödel also revealed that there are truths in some parts of mathematics that are not provable in terms of other parts of mathematics. You can’t always get there from here.

So as a yardstick of the truth of everything that is certain and clear, mathematics is – by Gödel’s account – hopelessly compromised.

In other words, it is incomplete.

Gödel also found love in the shadows, on the margins of society – on the fringes of Viennese show business where it sometimes shaded off into prostitution. Adele Porkert claimed to have trained as a ballet dancer but was now a dancer for hire in a bar. Six years older than Gödel, she had been married before. She was loud, crude, uneducated and streetwise. She saved Gödel from an attack by Nazi thugs outside the University of Vienna.

Kurt and Adele were married in 1938. By 1939, he was at risk of being drafted into the German army. They managed to escape to America, and John von Neumann secured Gödel a place at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he, Einstein and others worked.

Gödel would live there for the rest of his life. Einstein was a famously good-natured and genial man, but he did not like everyone equally. He complained, for instance, about von Neumann who liked to play bumptious military music which he said helped his own thinking processes – although it disturbed everyone else’s. On the other hand, Einstein recognised in Gödel a gentle, kindred spirit, and he came to think of him as his best friend. Most days they took long walks together discussing mathematics, physics, philosophy, politics and life. Einstein would say that these walks were the highlight of his later years.

Generally, though, Gödel tended to shy away from company. He preferred contemplation and solitude. One day, a colleague who had not seen Gödel for a couple of days knocked on his door. No reply, but the door was ajar, so he entered. He called out. Still no reply. But he saw a steaming cup of coffee, so he decided that Gödel must be there somewhere. He called again. Silence. Increasingly worried that Gödel must have had a fall, he searched the house until eventually he found him hiding in the basement, crouching behind the boiler.

Kurt Gödel’s own reaction to his discoveries was that they told only part of the story; that they were a partial revelation. He believed that beyond the incomplete mathematics we know about there exists a transcendent mathematics which is totally complete, harmonious and logical, which contains no ambiguities and nothing which is unprovable. Like Newton, he thought humanity was on the way to being intelligent enough to be able to grasp this transcendent mathematics – just not quite intelligent enough yet.

Also like Newton, he had a well-developed interest in the occult. He had originally been attracted to Adele partly because she had a strange-shaped birthmark on her face which he believed was a sign of her supernatural powers. He believed she was exceptionally telepathic, a gift they tested together and verified in over two hundred trials

Towards the end of his life when Gödel felt himself slipping into bouts of depression, he asked Adele to read him passages from the Gospels, believing such readings had healing properties. Sadly this was not enough to save him. After Einstein died, Gödel grew increasingly distressed. He once saw demonic creatures coming in through the windows and trying to inject him with drugs.

Then Adele was suddenly hospitalised. She needed emergency surgery, a colostomy, and afterwards she was sent to a nursing home to recuperate. Equally suddenly she discharged herself and rushed back home to check on Kurt. But she was just too late. Isolated and believing that colleagues were trying to poison him, Mr Why had starved himself to death.

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Some have found Gödel’s ‘incompleteness’ theorems alarming and corrosive. For them he discovered at the heart of logic the wicked worm of illogicality. American novelist David Foster Wallace called him ‘Modern Math’s absolute Prince of Darkness’.

But you can look at his achievement another way – and see him as shattering accretions of fossilised thinking. For example, the British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who also lived and worked at the Institute, saw Gödel’s account of mathematics as liberating. If – as Gödel argued – any mathematical system cannot be complete and true in and of itself but can only be complete and true within the context of another system, then the attempt to pin anything down must, as we have suggested, lead to an endless chain of systems. Gödel shows you how you can go beyond any system you are in, and you can see this as offering a route to transcendence. As Freeman Dyson put it, Gödel ‘proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass the whole of mathematics. Gödel’s theorem, in denying… the possibility of a universal algorithm to settle all questions, gave… instead, a guarantee that mathematics can never die… there will always be, thanks to Gödel, fresh questions to ask and fresh ideas to discover.’

If Gödel’s account of mathematics is accurate and if mathematics is an accurate description of the universe, then it follows that ours is an open-ended universe, endlessly, dynamically evolving new forms. I explore this further, as well as sharing more on the unexpected lives of many more scientists, in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe.

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In The Secret History of the World, I give an account of how someone living in the ancient world would have experienced a walk in a forest, at a time when everyone believed without question in a cosmic mind operating behind the material surface of things. This woodland walker inhabited a world where consciousness was not understood as originating in and confined to our skulls but spread out through mental and physical space.

‘To such a person,’ I wrote ‘the forest and everything in it was alive. Everything was watching. Unseen spirits whispered in the movements of the trees. A breeze brushing against his cheek was the gesture of a god. If the buffeting of blocks of air in the sky created lightning, this was an outbreak of cosmic will – and maybe he walked a little faster…

When he walked along a woodland pathway, he would have had a strong sense of following his destiny. Today many of us may wonder: How did I end up in this life that seems to have little or nothing to do with me? Such a thought would have been inconceivable to someone in the ancient world, where everyone was conscious of his or her place in the cosmos. Everything that happened to him – even the sound of the flight of a bee or the sight of a falling sparrow – was meant to happen.

…Everything spoke to him. Everything was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition. If he saw an owl, for example, this wasn’t just a symbol of the goddess, this was Athena. Part of her, a warning finger perhaps, was protruding into the physical world and into his own consciousness.’

This was a passage that many readers responded to, saying they recognised elements of their own present-day consciousness in this account of consciousness as it was understood in the ancient world.

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Since I wrote that book in 2008 science has progressed so that we can now describe that same experience of taking that walk through the forest in the language of science. We can go a long way to explaining and validating it.

We now know that trees, plants and even very simple life forms exercise a sentient intelligence. They read, react and respond to their environment. During the day, the mallow, for example, uses motor tissue at the base of its stalks to turn its leaves towards the sun. Trees likewise seek out sunlight and food. Recent books by Peter Wohlleben and Merlin Sheldrake have shown how plants and trees are aware of each other in space. They engage in problem-solving, including experimenting with new forms of behaviour, storing information for future application, manipulating things within the environment, calculating distances and probabilities, decision-making and cooperating with other plants, including other species. Older, more established trees in a forest will send nutrients to younger, growing trees. If one tree is attacked by insects, it will send information about this to other trees in the area so they can prepare their defences.

Trees communicate with each other through a variety of mechanisms, including chemical and electrical signalling, some of them reaching neighbouring trees through their roots and an underground fungal network. The number of such electronic impulses over an hour in a large forest is in the trillions.

While we might find it hard to accept that an individual tree or plant has anything like the degree of intelligence a human being has, our superiority is not so clear if we compare an individual human’s intelligence with that of a natural landscape such as a forest. We might each have 86 billion neurons firing inside our brain, but the extent and complexity of electrical activity, local and non-local, between trillions, perhaps quadrillions of cells in a forest may well be of a comparable scale. If we tend to imagine that our intelligence is generated locally, within the confines of our skulls, the intelligent interactions between trees, plants and fungi are unmistakably cooperative. When we walk through a forest this intelligence is spread out all around us in a way that makes it harder for us to recognise and understand given the model we have made for our own intelligence.

It might be objected that there’s another crucial difference, that we humans are conscious of our intelligent processes. But accounts differ as to how much of our own intelligent processes operate below the level of consciousness – estimates range between 90 per cent and 99 per cent. These processes have for us an existential inaccessibility. For example, we are not aware of the operations of intelligence that enable the conversion of food into nourishment, or the processing of air breathed into our lungs. Most of the neural processes that go on in the brain are not consciously accessible to us, and most of us do not understand the electrochemical events that create them.

Not only do our bodies know all sorts of things our minds don’t, but our minds know all sorts of things we don’t know either. Unconsciousness might be said to be our natural condition. We’re either asleep or, when awake, conscious of only a small part of our mental activity. In the same way that light is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us, the consciously thinking part of the spectrum of intelligent activity is the part we tend to identify as our ‘self’.

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A yet deeper understanding of the way intelligence in a landscape works, of the way that what is happening ‘out there’ is like our own mental and cognitive processes, poses a revolutionary frontier in cognitive / biological research.

Two brilliant young profs, Garry Nolan at Stanford and Michael Levine at Tufts, work independently but converge on using AI as a model to understand non-neural intelligence in biology, and its roots in physics and chemistry.

Transcending the traditional ‘neurocentric’ approach, they understand intelligence as working at a deeper level than brains. Even what we used to think of as a very simple cell has complex internal structures. Nolan describes them as ‘matrices which are the equivalent to layers of computer code’.

Pioneering work by Levin has shown how these processing systems within a single cell predict and interact with other complex systems in their environment. This interaction is crucial, he says, for their intelligent behaviour, for learning about their environments, memorising, engaging in bioelectrical communication and displaying swarm-like intelligence. They can sense food a distance away and successfully plan, improvise and adapt in order to navigate tricky terrains to reach it. In other words, they can draw on the intelligence in the terrain because they are part of wider bioelectric networks.

Nolan’s research involved using advanced analytical techniques, initially as part of a study of cancer but extending into studies of solid materials, primarily metals and crystalline structures. There, he observed cellular self-organisation and self-assembly operating in patterns like the ones he was familiar with in cancers. Here then intelligence informs what was previously thought to be inert.

Likewise, Levin talks about ‘matter with goals’ and sometimes, too, about ‘agential matter’. Nolan and Levin are working on the boundary between biology, physics and chemistry, where intelligence in what was previously seen as inert matter and from there works its way up into the biological realm. What makes this a practical possibility is that, as Nolan says: ‘DNA was in the complex computer that is the universe from the beginning. Biology was embedded in the universe from the beginning’.

This approach resonates with ideas about ‘constructors’ formed by David Deutsch, head of the quantum computer department at Oxford, often said to be the father of the quantum computer, with his young collaborator Chiara Marletto. Constructors, they argue, are part of the fabric of the universe, constructing intelligence from levels below the biological.

The suggestion that intelligence has always been implicit, perhaps immanent in the universe resonates with ancient mystical ideas of a cosmos drenched in the mind, where everything is conscious to some degree. We are conscious. Other animals are conscious in a different way. Even a stone is conscious, though in a very different way to our own daytime consciousness. It is more like the consciousness of deep, dreamless sleep. A stone in the landscape has intention and a destiny, but one which will be realised on a totally different timescale to the human one, lasting billions of years.

Discover more in my new book, The Secret History of the Universe, out June 2026.

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If you’ve seen the Google Doodle today, you’ll have realised that April 14th is World Quantum Day, so chosen as 4.14 mimics Max Planck’s constant, a key cornerstone in the development of Quantum Mechanics. Perhaps now is a good time to revisit the brilliant ideas and tragic life of Max Planck. He is not as famous as Einstein, perhaps not as famous as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg or Erwin Schrödinger, but Planck has many claims to be the All-Father of science in the twentieth century.

It was Planck who worked out that a beam of light is not a continual beam but made up of discrete little packets he called quanta. He also realised that the different colours of different beams of light must be tied to differences in these quanta, and by working out ways to measure their different behaviours he worked out too a way to describe what was happening at the level of the very small in mathematical terms. By doing this he made quantum mechanics possible.

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It was Planck who recognised, when no-one else did and a long time after they were published, the genius in papers written in 1905 by a young, unknown patents clerk, Albert Einstein. Planck saw the genius in these ideas about light and time, energy and matter partly because he had been thinking on similar lines himself. (Planck has been writing about the colossal amount of energy contained in the smallest particle as early as 1900 - but he had lacked the daring needed to publish).

Planck then helped Einstein secure academic posts. He also encouraged the younger man to apply his findings on light and special relativity more broadly to encompass gravity, pushing him towards what would come to be called general relativity.

It was also Planck who foresaw where the new physics would head in the second half of the twentieth century - towards an understanding that what is fundamental in the universe is no thing, however small, that it is nothing material or even semi material like a field. What is fundamental, he saw, is immaterial.

It is mind or consciousness.

Planck, then, was a prime mover in the evolution of a new physics towards an understanding of the cosmos which resonates with a religious understanding - a central narrative strand in my new book, The Secret History of the Universe. Planck was himself a deeply religious man. The mind or consciousness underlying and directing the universe might well be divine.

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But there is also a direct line from Planck to modern cultural phenomena like the Matrix movies or current ideas, popular among cutting edge scientists, that the universe is like a super-intelligent AI, a high intelligence that is not necessarily divine.

One way of looking at it is, Planck’ s quanta are like a pixels on a screen, the smallest units and the units it is impossible to see beyond. So Planck can also be understood as preparing the way for the idea, popular today which asserts that we live in a computer simulation. And if we do, who pushes the buttons on the keyboard? Is it God? Angels? Aliens? Or as some have posited, our own future selves?

Planck then had a wild mathematical and scientific imagination. His ideas were far out. But in his outer life - in what the mystic Jacob Boehme, very influential on many German philosophers and scientists, called ‘the Outworld’ - he played it safe.

Max Planck was an embodiment of the old bourgeois certainties, the conservatism, the hierarchy – of what today we would call the Establishment. He was born in 1858 to a large, prosperous family. His father was a professor, and Max followed in his footsteps, rising rapidly until in 1889 he became a full professor at a Berlin university. Throughout his career he dressed in the same conservative way – starched shirt, black bow tie and sober dark suit. Lise Meitner, one of his students and later the discoverer of nuclear fission, would remember his natural caution. If after a lecture a student questioned what he was saying, he would say: ‘I will give you my reply tomorrow.’

He married and he and his wife had a large family. Max was the great patriarch of German physics and he and Marie regularly entertained a wide circle of academics. Planck was a gifted musician. He sometimes invited young Albert Einstein round to his house to join in, playing string quartets and trios. It is said that Planck’s ear was so finely tuned that if any player in an orchestral concert he was attending was even marginally out of tune, he would have to leave.

In the early 1930s, Max Planck was tuning in to political developments. He privately described the rise of the Nazis as the rule of the mob. When in 1933 the Nazis began to drive Jews from their posts, he decided to write and ask for an audience with Hitler. Revered as Germany’s senior scientist, he believed he might make a difference. But a short account, My Visit to Hitler, describes how Hitler’s ranting and raving quickly showed him it was futile. As the persecution, humiliation and violence of and against Jews increased, many colleagues and friends in academia, like Einstein and Lise Meitner were forced to flee to Britain or America. Like his younger contemporaries, Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck decided to stay. They would say that their aim was to try to resist the influence of the Nazis from within.

Planck and Heisenberg were both naturally patriotic. They were both rightly proud of German science and their role in it. They wanted to be able to continue to do that work undisturbed. They decided to wait and see.

Towards the end of his life and as the war drew to a close, Planck regretted his moral compromises. He said they had blighted his life: ‘I had hoped that the new regime would protect science. I was wrong.’ Referencing the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, he said that they – the Germans – had lost their best minds, which grieved him deeply. He concluded: ‘We must pay the price for our silence.’ His house and precious library were destroyed in Allied bombing raids.

Shortly before the end of the Second World War, Max Planck’s son Erwin, the child to whom he was closest, was arrested by the Nazis and accused of participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Planck wrote to Hitler again, this time pleading for mercy for his son, but in January 1945, with the war lost and only weeks to go before an inevitable surrender, Erwin was tortured and executed.

Indeed, Max Planck’s life was beset by a series of tragedies. His wife, Marie, died young, possibly from tuberculosis. His son Karl was killed on the battlefield. Both his daughters died in childbirth.

Something I try to do in my histories is understand what is happening at a mythic level. The physicists who used their growing understanding of quantum mechanics to make the atom bomb, to coax what happens in the realm of the submicroscopic into the realm of human affairs were like magicians summoning up powers from the depths. Like Faust some made a deal with the devil and gained power, wealth, fame and sex with as many people as possible. Planck’s deal was different and more common place. It was like the deal most of us make, when we want to keep ourselves and our families safe, to remain well respected members of the community, perhaps respected among other things for our high moral and cultural standards. EM Foster, who lived less than a mile away from where I’m writing now described: ‘You give up trying to understand yourself and join the armies of the benign, pleasant and pious folk who have yielded to the only enemy that matters, the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth and as the years pass, they are censured, their pleasures and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy, they feel and produce discomfort whatever they do.’ E. M. Forster, Room With a View (1908).

It is perhaps not for people who have never suffered under a tyrannical regime to judge. We do not know how we would behave. But many of us, depending on where we live, are about to find out.

I discuss all this, and far more, in my latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, which is out now.

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It’s important to bear in mind that the word ‘atheism’ has changed meaning. There has been a spectrum of meanings attached to it, and the way it is used today is at one of the far ends and a very extreme point of view.

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In the ancient world, ‘atheism’ meant literally ‘without god’. An atheist rejected the city’s gods or failed to perform the required public rites. Atheism did not involve a rejection of the supernatural. For example, Socrates was executed for ‘not believing in the gods of the city’ and having his own personal, internal god who spoke to him alone, which the authorities may well have seen as threat.

Atheists often saw public religion as crude and simplistic. Xenophanes criticised the anthropomorphic gods of Homer, noting that if horses could draw, they would draw gods like horses. These sorts of arguments were logical and observational critiques of popular religion, not a denial of any divine principle.

Some atheists, like the Epicureans, believed gods existed but that they were indifferent to humanity.

The important point to bear in mind here is that these ancient world thinkers were not operating from a scientific, evidence-based physicalism.

Similarly, when the Scientific Revolution began to provide a mechanical model of the universe, many Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, Voltaire and Thomas Paine became Deists. They rejected revealed religion and ideas of a personal god and believed in a distant ‘Clockmaker God’ who created a universe which runs on reasonable lines according to natural laws.

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It was in the late 18th century that David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), used early mechanistic science to propose something very like modern atheism. As ideas of mechanistic science spread and gained traction, this was compounded by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, published in 1858, which seemed to make a creator God superfluous when it comes to explaining the complexity and diversity of life. But in the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century progressive thinkers found no way to explain how human intelligence had come about. They saw it in the context of a universe running along reasonable lines, as expressive of some form of intelligence. The most brilliant minds might discard the revealed knowledge of organised religion, but they wanted to know how far their own reason would take them in understanding what it is really like.

The new science of Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Meitner and others whose stories we have yet to tell should be seen in that context, as a spiritual quest. I delve into this in more detail in The Secret History of the Universe, out soon.

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