Reflections. On science and religion and a bit of philosophy and on me and on: where I am, how I got there, what/who influenced me..
Writing of these notes started in November, 2025, as I was less than four months away from my 88th birthday (and finished long after my birthday).
(For someone who does not know my background, I was born and raised in Hungary and immigrated to the United States as a refugee at age 18 in 1957, after a failed revolution against the Soviet Union.)
As I wrote in my first posted blog, I write this to myself, but with the idea that, anyone interested is welcome to read it.
Introduction
While these thoughts have been with me for much of my life, their actual review and this writing were triggered by my daughter-in-law sending me a link regarding Bohmian quantum mechanics and the controversy with the Copenhagen school. In her email that sent me the link, she proposed that we have a discussion. I was very surprised that she studied this subject and wanted to discuss it, but I was also fascinated and proceeded to review it. As it turned out she had not read up on it and also was not very familiar with it, but somehow she thought that it would be an interesting subject. - - Yes indeed, for me this is an interesting subject, not so much specifically the Bohmian argument, but more as it touches on many aspects of my training in science and general philosophy. Or putting it more simply, it is connected to and touches on many of my thoughts that have been with me throughout much of my life. - - Thus these notes do not provide any details of my evaluation of Bohm versus the Copenhagen school. David Bohm was a great physicist; he wrote my very first quantum mechanics textbook in Berkeley. (Also, my son told me that 40 years later he too studied from the same textbook in the same department at the same university.) - - My short summary of the Bohmian argument versus Copenhagen school is simply that it has no practical consequence, no clear guidance for further work, and thus not of great interest. It is simply the intellectual self satisfaction of a mathematically oriented theoretical physicist. (In the following I will provide some details on how I reached this conclusion, and who guided me to it.)
Where I come from
Science, religion, philosophy, and politics. These topics and their related concepts have all been in my mind from a very early age, driven by my environment, interests, and activity.
My mother was a devoted Catholic. Thus the Catholic religion has been with me from before I was born. As I recall it, I received my earliest scientific lesson when I was about five years old. One afternoon my brother and I were with our father in our father's study; he reached up to the top of his bookshelf, picked up a compass and showed it to us. It was a small circular device with a wobbling needle in the middle; one end of the needle was dark, the other light. Our father then told us that the Earth has a magnetic field and the object he held is a magnetized needle that aligns with the earth's magnetic field; no matter how the base is rotated the dark needle always points to the North. From then on I knew that there were magnetic fields and magnets and they interacted in some predictable manner. - - That was probably the first step that took me in the direction of science. It certainly was the first step that I recall. During my many years of involvement with science there were several major events but none as groundbreaking for me as my first learning about the compass and magnetic fields.
I grew up in the strange combination of an extremely hostile external environment and a very warm family, or even more accurately a warmly supportive extended-family home-environment. Our core group lived in one large apartment with dinners regularly together. We were 12: 6 children and 4 parents, the combined group of my parents, and their 4 kids, and my mother’s sister and her husband and their 2 kids. Our dinners provided the foundation for the core elements of our education. The dinners were chaired by my father, but all participating members, including all children and adults, were free to participate in all conversations. All of us were allowed, even encouraged, to ask any questions or raise any subject as long as we did it politely and did not offend anybody. In the worst case our questions were not answered and possibly rejected (as it happened to me when around age 13 I asked about how children were born, to which my father answered “You already know the answer; don’t fool around”). Our dinners, especially on Sundays and holidays, also regularly included members of both my father’s and mother’s extended families.
The hostility of the external environment, which started with WWII, first included bombardments and rushing to air raid shelters, combined with persecutions. Life then moved towards more persecution and discrimination. The persecutions first included newspaper articles against my father, claiming that he was a hider of Jews (which was true) and then later on assigning us the enemy of the people identity. (During the Stalinist communist era in Hungary there were five “people identities”, one of which was assigned to everyone: peasant, worker, intellectual, other (mostly merchants), and enemy of the people. These identifiers were included in all school and work registration documentations as well as personal ID documents. - - During my high school years I was engaged in a continuous struggle to retain an intellectual designation and to avoid that of class enemy.)
I was born into a well off family. By the time I turned 12, things were beginning to change. At age 14 I started part-time work and since then I earned all I needed to cover all my own clothing and cash expenses. - - My paternal grandfather died when my father was 15 years old. My orphan father then immediately became a live-in teacher to someone whose father was three-times Prime Minister (Wekerle Sandor) of Hungary during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As it turned out, my father was very lucky. The Prime Minister was not only his employer but also became more or less a de-facto sponsoring father to my father. As a result of this luck and of hard work my father not only finished high school but then finished law school, became a high-level employee of the government as well as an economist, and eventually a top manager in private industry. But then came communism; after age 60 and my father became an unskilled laborer.
My family was definitely intellectually oriented and showed a great degree of diversity. My paternal grandfather immigrated to Budapest from Austria at age 15, 100 years before I immigrated to the United States. First, he became a school teacher. Then he studied more, finished university and also earned a doctorate and became a natural scientist, eventually a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Hungary’s first Darwinist. At his funeral a fellow Academy member eulogized: “his heart became pure Hungarian but his tongue remained German”. His father, my paternal great grandfather, migrated from Switzerland to Austria after the Napoleonic wars. What led to his migration was the devastation of the family’s farming assets in Menzingen, Switzerland, caused by the occupying French army. (That was the last time Switzerland was invaded. He was born in Menzingen, in 1793, the invasion was in 1798,) As a young adult, he moved to Vienna and earned a law degree. Unfortunately, my grandfather never knew his father. His mother, my great-grandmother, who was close to 30 years younger than her husband, abandoned her husband when she was pregnant with my grandfather because she learned about a supposed affair my great-grandfather may have had years before they were married. Hthe er youthful heart was unable to cope with such mis-perceived infidelity. My maternal grandfather was born in what is today Slovakia. He too was orphaned early and was raised by an older sister in a village household without luxuries. Somehow he managed to earn an engineering degree and move to Budapest. He always considered himself Hungarian but summer-times in my mother’s childhood were spent in the old village where my mother learned Slovakian she spoke at the level of a native born. My paternal grandmother was born in Budapest; her father too was born there. He was a successful glass merchant, and judging by some details of the evolution of their family name, most likely they were of Jewish origin. My maternal grandmother was born in Budapest to parents who hailed from what is today Sombor, Serbia. - - Thus it is very clear that I come from a “pure” Hungarian line, which prepared me well to become an immigrant in the United States of America. No doubt: I am at home here!
Now back to the culture surrounding me growing up (very importantly) at the above mentioned family dinners.
As I stated above, my mother was a very religious Catholic. Her approach to life bordered on puritanity. I would characterize my father as a conservative liberal democrat. In his early years he was very much influenced by his fathers Darwinian views. In his later years he learned very much from the above-mentioned Prime Minister, whom he greatly admired, who even though he served in a Royal Empire appears to have professed western democratic views. - - Our household was definitely Catholic, although our extended family also included Protestants; My maternal grandfather, for example, was a strongly believing Evangelical. I often wonder whether my mothers puritanical Catholicism was not strongly formed by her father's puritanical Evangelism. - - My father was not very religious. But my mother’s rule (of religion) was accepted by all; there was never any conflict on this account.
I was aware of earlier conflicts between science and religion. I knew about Galileo, about the conflict between the religious Earth-centered (geocentric) and the scientific Sun-centered (heliocentric) views. Also in my mind, there was a conflict between the God-created-man and the Darwinian evolutionary views. While in our household both views were definitely present they never appeared to come into any conflict. Not that it was reconciled, but somehow conflict was avoided, even though both views were present. - - It was only much later that I learned that the Vatican has never explicitly criticized Darwinism. While several Catholic organizations and influential individuals wrote and publicly spoke against Darwinism, no pope has ever come out against it. Some of the explanations I find difficult to comprehend; for example the teaching/explanation that the human body may have evolved, but the soul was given to humans by God to the evolved body, I find it very difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, catholic schools do teach evolutionary theory. The modern Roman Catholic Church accepts science.
My road to science
I was very much raised definitely as an active Catholic. I was very much aware that my mother wanted me to become a priest, preferably a monk. I was also always good in mathematics and physics in school, which never presented a conflict. (Perhaps in my mother's view I was to become a science teaching monk in a Catholic School.) I served as an altar boy. I studied Latin. Back then the Catholic Mass was celebrated in Latin, with Latin the language of the church. I had my own confessor and advisor, a Benedictine monk who was also a high school teacher. Later on, as part of the systematic anti-church communist campaigns, he was arrested, probably tortured, and imprisoned. Prior to his arrest he was in partial hiding, wearing civilian clothes. During that period I remember that, to counteract his exposure to secret police surveillance, once I confessed to and obtained absolution from him while we pretended to be casually talking and walking the streets in the inner city of Budapest, gazing at shop windows.
For a while my Confessor also taught me both Latin and English. I was more interested in English. When I stopped studying Latin he told me that this will make it much more difficult for me to become a Benedictine monk. Clearly it was not only my mother who thought that I was heading in that direction even though I never said so.
How did I wind up a scientist? A short answer is that it evolved progressively as a simple practical matter. I became a scientist not in pursuit of philosophical questions, but driven by a need to find the best road for survival, and preferably not only survival, but attaining the best survival. Achieving a good life was the direction of my pursuit along my lifeline for many years. Seeking answers to reconcile some basic questions between science, religion, and possibly philosophy did not even occur to me for many years after I had completed my doctoral studies and earned my PhD at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, doing research in engineering physics.
In 1952 I wanted to have a radio. But we had no money and all radios had been turned in to the government during World War II. Somehow I learned that one can build a “potato radio". Such a radio would only work for AM broadcasts and in the vicinity of a very high intensity transmitter that dominated all other signals in the air. Under those conditions all one needs to build the radio is a potato cut into two halves, earphones, and a simple crystal rectifier. Also one needs a long wire oriented the correct way to serve as an efficient antenna and a shorter wire tying one of the potato halves to the water faucet that serves as a ground. The antenna wire is connected to one half of the potato while the ground is connected to the other half. Somewhere I found a pair of old earphones and also acquired a rectifier. The ear-phones and rectifier connect, or bridge, the two potato halves. I put it together and it worked. Not very well but it worked, with very low volume and a highly scratchy sound. This was a victory that highly motivated me to proceed. Back there then were no transistors, nor other solidstate devices. All consumer electronics worked with vacuum tubes that were pentods, tryodes, and diodes. Somewhere I found some old discarded dysfunctional radios that still had working loudspeakers and some working vacuum tubes in them. I bought some books and talked to some people who knew more than I did. I built my own soldering iron and started building and designing radios. Our district's electricity supply was still the old-fashioned DC current. Thus I did not need transformers, voltage was simply adjusted by resistors. I had no instruments so I guessed. To test the presence or absence of voltage, sometimes I used my fingers. That was not very smart, but it worked and I survived.
I always wanted to study. At that time in communist Hungary there were only two learned professions that were realistic for people with my background. Either engineering, or medicine. I had no real interest in medicine, thus I focused on engineering. As I finished high school I received expert advice to apply only at a school in the country's eastern edge. I was told that if I applied anywhere else, I would be rejected and not admitted anywhere. But if I applied at the recently created new school, I would be admitted with no problem. Unfortunately, at that school there was no electrical engineering. But I followed the advice and applied, and was admitted to a machine-building mechanical engineering program. I started University. But, soon came the Revolution of 1956. I participated, we lost. Then I left, and with good luck wound up in California. By the beginning of February 1957 I was a student at UC Berkeley. I stayed there, starting as a freshman and ending with a PhD in the College of Engineering in 1964. I put myself through those 7 and 1/2 years by earning my living first as a dishwasher in a student dormitory, then as a technician in an electric heater manufacturing company in San Francisco, and finally as a teaching and research assistant at UC Berkeley.
For my bachelor's degree I passed through a standard electronics curriculum. For my master’s thesis I prepared theoretical physics calculations based on quantum mechanics, oriented towards the then emerging laser technology. For my PhD dissertation I worked in plasma physics and light emission; first I built a small plasma device and then did detailed spectroscopic measurements on the light it emitted under various experimentally adjusted plasma conditions.
With my new PhD, I went into industry. First I was a researcher and later on became a manager, first in research then in electronic display manufacturing oriented engineering. I filed and received many patents and published papers.
Science and religion meet and their interface is understood
The philosophical aspects of science, and the possible connection and/or conflict with religion started to interest me when I was about 40 years old. For anyone with a religious background who also studies Cosmology, it would be very difficult to avoid this conflict or question. How does the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe meet the religious view of creation? A long time ago we had Helio-centrism versus Geo-centrism. Then we had an evolution from macromolecules to Homo Sapiens. Now we have an expanding Universe, starting from an infinitesimally small space with infinite energy density, driven through millions of years of expansion by a mysterious force, derived from dark energy.
A simple resolution of this question for me came from father Stanley Jaki, a Templeton Prize winning Benedictine professor. He held a doctorate in theology from the Vatican University in Rome. Subsequently he earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Fordham University in New York. When we met he was a professor at Seton Hall and lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where I also resided at that time. He wrote dozens of books. I first became aware of him and his work through a book review published in Physics Today, a monthly journal of the American Physical Society. Later we met by chance through a social connection, and then we became friends. We spent many hours together sipping some wine and having long conversations.
Father Jaki taught me: Whatever is quantifiable observable and can be described and understood by numbers and equations, and independent researchers can verify the previous findings by repeating the experiments and the calculations, is science.
Whatever does not meet the above criteria is the proper domain for religion.
We know that most of the mass in theUniverse is dark mass and the growth of the Universe is driven by dark energy that exceeds all known energy. We observed the existence and effects of these dark entities some decades ago, but have no idea what they are; we have no theory, no understanding.
We know a lot about our environment and our bodies. We also know quite a bit about how to at least partially control both. But we don’t know how/what we came from, what we are, nor where we are heading.
Where does this leave us?
Back to science
And now I return to the email link that my daughter-in-law sent to me, which started this writing. (https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/david-bohms-pilot-wave-interpretation.html) The essay on that link was written by Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, whose 2018 book “Lost In Math” I read a few years ago. Since then it served as a footnote to what Father Jaki taught me. In her book she describes how modern theoretical physicists, including herself, have gone astray. She states that there have not been any new groundbreaking experimental results recently. There is not much fundamental new to analyze and most of the theoretical work nowadays is nothing more than self satisfaction in mathematics by theorists. The unanswered questions have been known for a while and no recent attempt provided any useful answers. My guess is that new experimental results are needed to guide us forward before new useful theories will be developed.
In 2012 the scientific community celebrated the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC in Geneva. This discovery was the result of a major International Cooperative effort. It cost many billions of dollars, involved thousands of scientists from all over the world. I spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to understand the details of this discovery. I understand that for those who are deeply involved in particle physics and in the frontiers of theoretical research this result provided an understanding of mass. According to this teaching there is a scalar field covering the entire universe and the interaction between the Higgs bosons and this field is what explains the mass that particles exhibit. A problem is that not all experts are convinced that this particle in fact is the Higgs boson and also there are major issues related to the Higgs field itself; specifically, its energy content is highly uncertain. From a practical point of view, mass is an intrinsic property of matter and with Einstein's relativity we also understand that while rest mass may be an intrinsic property but mass is also influenced by movement through space-time. Maybe in the future, with additional calculations and experiments, we will be able to explain some of the unknowns in today's world like dark energy and dark mass, and the Higgs boson may help in that. However, currently this is not the case: we have no proven connection between those unknowns and Higgs bosons. It is interesting to note that the above cited Sabine Hossenfelder’s book came out 6 years after the much celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson.
I do understand that sometimes basic discoveries may lead to practical applications in the future that are completely unknown at the time of the discovery. An interesting case in this regard is a gravitational time dilation, a discovery that is a consequence of general relativity. In the early part of the 20th century proof of general relativity was obtained through astronomical observations, without any expectation of direct practical application. Late in the 20th century the GPS satellite system was installed in order to provide globally precise positioning capability. The GPS satellites fly about 20,000 km above the surface of the Earth and their design had to explicitly include corrections for the time dilation, as predicted by general relativity, in order to achieve the desired precision in their position determination.
Clearly, we do not know ahead of time the consequence of all discoveries. But knowledge we must advance. Maybe one day we will discover significant practical applications for the Higgs field and Higgs bosons too.
For me the theoretical basis for science is provided by classical mechanics, electromagnetism, Quantum mechanics, and Einsteinian relativity.
So what is religion for me now? For me belonging to a religion is similar to that of belonging to a nation. It is good to belong somewhere, to share some values and thoughts (and even some rules) with others. Dogmas and exclusivisms I reject. Is there something supernatural out there or in us? Maybe. Make your own choice!
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A light-hearted end note where Everyday Life and Science meet
Most people have heard about the famous twin paradox that is a consequence of Einstein's special relativity. Likewise, most people have heard the encouragement not to sit but to move and thereby avoid aging prematurely. But most people are not aware that the issues addressed by these two statements are closely connected. Following the teachings of special relativity, if two people, who could be twins but do not necessarily have to be, meet and after synchronizing their watches one of them sits down, while the other one takes a walk and later on returns to his sitting friend, after they compare their watches again, irrespective of the speed of the walk they find that the person who sat has definitely aged more than the one who walked. This is a scientific fact that has been proven through mathematical formulas as well as multiple experiments. (If the walker’s speed would approach the speed of light, the age difference would be significant, one year walking would be equivalent to many years of aging while sitting. At easily achievable speeds, whether walking or flying jet planes, the difference between moving and staying in one place is so small that it is practically impossible to measure. And this is why for centuries even scientists practicing Newtonian mechanics did not notice the elapsed time difference between staying stationary and moving. Nevertheless, by now the difference is a well proven fact.)
