The 4D Man told the story of two brothers who developed an “amplifier” that enabled them to have fourth dimensional powers. (Basically, they could pass through walls.) In the fourth dimension, however, time moved more rapidly, and passing into the 4D therefore meant aging quickly. (There were downsides to wandering into other planes of existence.) The same themes were played out in a 1963 episode of the sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits, though here the 4D machine transported people (briefly) to a plane of existence that looked like a shadowy afterlife where scientists could call out for spirits of lost loved ones. This show began with the cast around a séance table. It ended with a successful journey to the 4D/heaven in a scientific laboratory.
The film and the TV show suggest ways that Americans borrowed scientific ideas about other dimensions to help them imagine the existence of unseen realms and recover an imaginative sense for the supernatural. Books about other dimensions—some theological but many sci-fi or fiction—did the same thing. In the last thirty years, with the rise of multidimensional string theory, there are more and more popularizations of science that religious people take up with enthusiasm and wonder. Science and science fiction point the way to uncanny, mysterious, and otherworldly realities.
That the universe is uncanny and mysterious is admitted even by more sober physicists today. Fred Alan Wolf is not one of them. He is a scientific mystic with a fantastic superhero alter ego—Dr. Quantum—who, like the 4D scientists in The 4D Man, found new powers and abilities in twentieth-century science.
Wolf received his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963 and actively worked in the field until a 1971 sabbatical trip to India and Katmandu, where he had his first religious experience in a Buddhist temple. He left his academic position at San Diego State University in 1974 and set out with a few friends and left wing physicists to create the Fundamental Fysiks Group in San Francisco, a group that used quantum principles to explain ESP, psychokinesis, occult phenomena, and spirit communication. Since then Wolf has written popular books about spirituality, consciousness, and quantum physics. The image reproduced here is from one of these books.
What happens when, as it says on the cover, “science meets spirit”? Wolf and other quantum mystics have identified several ways that scientific thinking has led to new religious ideas. I can enumerate three here:
1. Quantum science shows us that the natural world is mysterious, uncanny, and multidimensional. Nature dissolves into energetic forces that elude the epistemologies of measurement and control scientists have traditionally used. All things can look like particles or waves but at bottom are different forms of energy vibrating at different frequencies.
2. God is an immanent force in this energetic world, or perhaps is coextensive with this energetic world.
3. Mind or spirit is the source of all realities and things. If in former times it seemed true that mind/spirit was epiphenomenal and the material world was the only real reality, today the reverse is true: the material world is epiphenomenal and mind/spirit is the only reality. (Wolf and others reach this conclusion by interpreting the observer effect in quantum physics. Long story.) The preoccupation with the power of the mind or consciousness to shape or determine reality is a preoccupation that increases as the twentieth century wears on, though it is unmistakably present in James as well, who believed our intentions shaped reality and who argued that our consciousness contained mysterious powers of mystical perception.
My argument in this short piece has been pretty simple. It is that twentieth-century believers have appropriated ideas from the sciences (and especially from popular science publications) to fashion new ways of thinking about God and the transcendent. There is no doubt that Americans draw on a range of ideas and images as they reimagine religious concepts. But science has a privileged place in our culture. It is probably the most powerful source of certain knowledge. Why not incorporate its key metaphors and concepts as we try to understand where Americans get their ideas about the world, its mysterious qualities, ineradicable ghosts, and transcendent boundaries?
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