Dave Pruett PhD, From Ancient Wisdom to the Quantum Universe

Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Prof Dave Pruett, former NASA researcher; award-winning computational scientist; emeritus professor of applied mathematics at James Madison University (JMU); the originator of "From Black Elk to Black Holes", a Templeton-award-winning Honors seminar at JMU; and the author of Reason and Wonder: A Copernican Revolution in Science and Spirit (Praeger 2012, paperback 2016). Reason and Wonder, synthesizes modern scientific insights with ancient spiritual wisdom.
Prof. Ptuett says he learned a lot from the work of French paleontologist-priest Teilhard de Chardin who held that biological evolution is not directionless. It tends toward greater biological complexity with concomitantly higher consciousness.
This gave rise to the twin theories of cosmogenesis and complexity-consciousness. Dave also found Jung’s radical theories of the unconscious, synchronicity, and individuation influenced his own theories.
In the present, scientific discoveries, particularly those of Quantum Mechanics, are now beginning to resonate with and reinforce ancient wisdom, wisdom that has been imbedded in indigenous mythologies for millennia. It’s incumbent upon those who have already transitioned to a more sustainable “myth of meaning” to find ways to encourage others along the path.
We talked about mysticism. Teilhard and Jung were mystics. One definition of a “mystic,” paraphrased from theologian Matthew Fox (1991), states simply: A mystic is one who is in awe of the universe.
It’s quite extraordinary that Black Elk and Einstein were contemporaries, even more so that their profoundly different backgrounds and education would lead them to similar views of the universe. The “web of life”—which connects all beings, living and “non-living”—figures prominently in Native American mythology. So too, from Einstein’s general theory of relatively, we learn that the geometry of spacetime is not Euclidean like a sheet of graph paper; it’s warped by the presence of massive objects like stars. The warping of spacetime is dynamic, varying in time. In the great cosmic dance, matter tells spacetime how to warp, and spacetime tells matter how to move. In this dance, the motions of stars or the interactions of black holes send gravitational waves rippling throughout the spacetime web. In both worldviews, the universe is a great interconnected web.
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