THE SEARCH FOR HOW THE WORLD WORKS

In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman

Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo's crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man's sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.

Still, Galileo's views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science."

For more than a thousand years leading up to the time of Galileo, science had been more interested in creating intellectually satisfying descriptions of reality than in trying to see if those descriptions could be supported by proof. But with the age of Copernicus and Galileo, European scientists began the vigorous pursuit of empirical evidence. Thought experiments gave way to actual physical experiments, such as the famous moment when Galileo dropped two objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to test out Aristotle's assertion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. (They don't.)

From Galileo's time onward, scientists' precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a contemporary of Galileo's who is today regarded as "the father of modern philosophy," declared that the best way to understand how the world works would be to divide existence into two parts: the objective or material world, governed by the principles of science, and the subjective world of the mind and the soul, which would be the province of the church.

Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? As contemporary physicist John Hagelin has said, "There is a deep philosophical problem surrounding how you get consciousness out of a hunk of meat."

Despite Descartes' neat division of reality, common sense suggested that our thoughts must be connected to the rest of existence somehow. But how, exactly? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

A WORLD INSIDE THE ATOM

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton, who described a universe of empty, three-dimensional space, through which physical objects move according to immutable laws. These laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

What we have been able to accomplish by applying Newton's laws has been truly astonishing. But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the tidy, objective, mechanistic view of the world began to fall apart. With the discovery of radioactivity in the late 1890s, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the "atom" itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

Coined in ancient Greece, the term atom means "indivisible unit," and through the nineteenth century, scientists believed that our entire physical universe was composed of these elementary particles. But radioactivity showed us that the atom was divisible after all -- in fact, there was a whole new world of phenomena inside the atom, waiting to be explored, measured, and described. And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

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