ON THE NATURE OF FAMOUS SCIENTISTS AND THEIR BELIEF IN GOD

Here is a list of 25 famous scientists who believed in God.  You know many of them:  Francis Bacon, Francis Collins, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Leibniz, Gregor Mendel, Guglielmo Marconi, Isaac Newton, James Maxwell, Johannnes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Max Planck, Michael Faraday, Nicholas Copernicus, Robert Boyle, Werner Heisenberg, and William Kelvin.





The person listed at the top was Einstein.  Still a controversy, but all signs indicated he did not believe in God as most do today, for to quote:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

Also on that list is believer Blaise Pascal, famous for his quote, which I got to admit, makes sense.  For by adhering, you have that emotional crutch about dying.  I envision an eternal gloom, which is troubling.

Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662, only 39 years.  But that was about average for his time.  His wager is considered to be groundbreaking, for it charted new territory in probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism and voluntarism.

An intriguing person on the list is Erwin Schrodinger, a Nobel Laureate Austrian who lived from 1887 to 1961.  He is best known for his equation and cat.  Why he is on this list is also puzzling, for he considered himself to be an atheist.  He quotes God all the time, but only in a metaphorical sense.

All I can say is, what a life.  Although he was married, he produced three children with other women.  In 1927 he succeeded Max Planck at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, but left in 1934 because, although he was Catholic, disliked Hitler's anti-semitism.  He moved to Oxford, where he won a Nobel Prize with Paul Dirac.  But he left Oxford because the administration could not accept his living with two women.  Princeton was next, but they also did not condone his conjugal arrangements.  In 1936 he returned to Austria, with a dual chair in India.

During all this period he extensively corresponded with Albert Einstein and proposed Schrodinger's Cat as a thought experiment.  If you want to feel educated, click on that and try to comprehend what he said.  Of course, you need to understand the nature of quantum superposition.

Oh, there is also Schrodinger's Equation, which I won't try to explain:

That Paul Dirac who shared the Nobel Prize with Schrodinger, one day I'll elaborate.  Dirac was strange and laconic.  His Cambridge colleagues joking created a unit called "dirac," which was one word per hour.  A baffling genius who helped establish quantum theory.  Here is a short paper on his religious beliefs.

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