Scientist on Immortality

Dressed warmly, his radio turned low, Astronomer Gustaf Stroemberg of the Mount Wilson Observatory spends night after night looking up at a great curved slit of the heavens. Born at Gothenburg, Sweden 57 years ago, a student of physics, mathematics and celestial mechanics, listed and starred (voted outstanding by his scientific colleagues) in American Men of Science for distinguished research in stellar motions, statistics and luminosities, Gustaf Stroemberg is nevertheless not the kind of scientist to pore myopically over tables and spectrum slides while taking the stars for granted. During the long nights on the mountain overshadowing Pasadena, he has done a lot of unorthodox thinking about the human mind, the human soul, the World Soul, Cosmic Consciousness, Cosmos, God. Now he has published the result of his pondering in a book, The Soul of the Universe* a calm treatise calculated to make the flesh of hardheaded materialists crawl. He starts with straightforward scientific exposition, but soon plunges into intuitive extensions; then into metaphysics, mysticism, finally into unabashed theism.

Overt purpose of the book is to examine the findings of modern science for light on the domain commonly accepted as beyond science. Quantum Mechanics (mathematics of the atom) finds that a subatomic particle, e. g., an electron, is accompanied by immaterial waves of energy which seem to guide it. Indeed it is only by analysis of its "pilot wave" that the speed and position of an electron can be determined, and then only probably, not certainly. Immaterial waves need not be tangled up with matter at all. Like radio waves, they can exist in or travel through nothingness.

Take something immensely more complex than an electron: a living cell. When the cell is "ready" to divide, the centrosome separates and moves to opposite sides, the chromosomes line up in the middle and then split evenly; then some thing nips in the sides of the cell to a wasp-waisted constriction, and finally the cell divides into two healthy duplicates of its original self. Biologists have the devil's own time trying to explain this mysterious, well-drilled maneuver. In Stroemberg's view, it is initiated and controlled by an "immaterial wave of organization." Though immaterial, the guiding wave has a structure in spacetime. Stroemberg calls it a "genie" (plural, "genii").

A developing embryo, far more complex than a single cell, has a commanding genie and subordinate genii for each organ, each cell. So has an adult organism. Even colonies of individuals may have a commanding genie, as when the marine animals called Portuguese Men-of-War gather in a cluster which behaves like a single animal, with groups of individuals told off to perform various organic functions. Finally, the whole universe, which is in constant evolution, must have a supreme genie--the Cosmos or World Soul.

Dr. Stroemberg regards mind and matter as two aspects of cosmic unity, but the subjective sensations of the mind are beyond the grasp of physical science. In physics, red light is an electromagnetic vibration having a wave length of about .000065 centimetre. Somewhere in the eyes, optic nerves and brain of a man, that vibration is translated into a sensation of redness, something that science cannot describe or explain. A blind scientist could be an absolute master of optics and spectroscopy, and never know what redness is. But since the sensation is common to all normal people, it must have reality, it must have a source. This source Dr. Stroemberg also adds to his collection of unknowables under the heading of World Soul--the wellspring of all sensations, ideas, thoughts, aspirations.

Onward to immortality is an easy step. The immaterial mind structure called memory is a sort of genie of the brain. But the brain atoms are completely replaced every few years, while the memory may survive intact for 80 years or longer. Thus he argues that memory is independent of matter. If it can survive a replacement of matter during life, why should it not survive the dissolution of the brain cells after death? "The memory of an individual," says Thinker Stroemberg in italics, "is written in indelible script in space and time--it has become an eternal part of a Cosmos in development."

Stroemberg defines the soul as "the ego of a human being . . . something which gives unity to the mental complex of a man." Though immaterial, he considers it a real structure, like a field of force. Therefore it cannot be annihilated without violating a law analogous to the purely physical law of conservation of mass and energy. Exactly what experiences the human soul may have after death, the author does not presume to say. He thinks the transmigration of souls entirely possible.

On the problem of life on earth: "As the matter in the earth is part of the original matter in the universe, so the life on the earth is part of the original life in the universe."

A man, even a scientist, has a right to his own opinion. But for publishing The Soul of the Universe, Astronomer Stroemberg is likely to be criticized, as other soul-minded scientist-writers have been, on two grounds: 1) for uttering pronouncements in fields of science not his own (in this case, biology); 2) for cramming scientific findings, some of them dubious, into the mold of his personal metaphysics. But Stroemberg is defiantly serene: "In a boyish spirit and with flying colors we set out on a new kind of adventurous exploration, caring little about the jeers from the people playing on the shore or the polite smiles of learned men." The Soul of the Universe is a provocative and outstanding attempt of a modern scientist to take his science to the unknown, rather than whistle to the unknown to come and make itself known.

*McKay ($2).

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