Gerald O’Donnell
May 29, 2007
Eighteenth and nineteenth century physical science had completed and embellished the “golden age of a mechanistic and deterministic models of the universe” where the universe and its constituents are ruled by rigid interactive forces that can be measured, phenomena that can be predicted using mathematical tools, and where the universe or any system operating within it is made of the sum of its parts.
Light was thought to be an electromagnetic wave vibrating in an undetected, and later experimentally disproved media: “the ether”, at certain rates of vibration that would define its color. It was part of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that allowed one to perceive an electromagnetic wave as heat, light , radio waves, or other electromagnetic radiations depending on the frequency of its vibrations. This spectrum had been well-defined by the equations of the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1864.
Man’s biology was reduced to a mechanical system albeit of extreme complexity, and thought was perceived to be but an epiphenomenon of the mechanical brain.
All this was very hygienic, logical, and comforting. It allowed to view the so-called invisible world of spiritual forces or entities as …