Author’s views go beyond science
Those who know him as a longtime professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and the likable star of the Emmywinning documentary “Journey of the Universe” might imagine that Brian Thomas Swimme’s professional ascent was a smooth one. Not so. Decades ago, as a young mathematician teaching at the University of Puget Sound, he was mired in crisis.
It was the early 1980s, and Swimme was troubled that the Pentagon and corporate America were using colleges like his as talent pipelines. Meanwhile, he was increasingly convinced that humans needed more than complex equations to understand the universe. Swimme had arrived at a crucial juncture in his nascent career. He managed the stress, he writes in “Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe,” by “freeze-drying my system with” vodka.
Swimme characterized this chapter in his life as “a breakdown — it was a breakdown of worldview” that left him feeling like “a tool for others.”
“Science, by focusing just on knowledge without any reflection on the ultimate meaning for a human being, left us in the situation where we were basically handing on our knowledge to corporations and to the military,” he said. “We were training young minds without giving them a sense of what they were really about.”
He knew something was off, Swimme added, yet he “wasn’t able to articulate that when I was a young professor.”
Forty years later, he’s given it a shot. “Cosmogenesis” is the most personal of Swimme’s half-dozen books, a thought-provoking, humble memoir about a period when he stepped off the academic treadmill and forged a transformative intellectual friendship.
Swimme, 72, was nearing 30 when his crisis began. As a boy, he said, he was educated “in what could be called the first story — the religious view, in my case, Catholic.” When he was an undergraduate at Santa Clara University and a math grad student at the
University of Oregon, he “encountered the thrill of scientific understanding.”
Bruce Bochte attended Santa Clara alongside Swimme, and they later collaborated on several projects, including a video series on the origin of the universe. In a phone interview, Bochte, an Oakland A’s first baseman in the 1980s, told The Chronicle that one of Swimme’s enduring traits is “an openness — an open mind that is in constant state of wonder, curiosity, exploration.”
Early in his career, though, Swimme’s Catholic upbringing and his enthusiasm for math and physics began to clash.
“It didn’t really hit me until I was a young professor,” he said, “but the incoherence of these two stories — they don’t sit well together. That’s when it came to a head.”
In 1981, Swimme quit his job at Puget Sound and began what he describes in the book as “a yearlong conversation with Thomas Berry,” a Catholic priest and scholar who sought to bridge the gap between spirituality and science. “Cosmogenesis,” informed by notes Swimme took at the time, includes heady exchanges between Swimme and Berry; many of these are about what Berry termed “a sickness of the intellect” — a frame of mind that prevents scientists from acknowledging that complex equations don’t untangle all of the universe’s mysteries.
“I don’t believe that at our stage of development we humans have the cognitive capacities for understanding the deepest dynamics at work in the universe,” Berry tells Swimme in the book. “Science,” Berry says on another occasion, “gave birth to our technological power, which we are using to rob Earth of its vitality.”
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Swimme’s co-author on the 2011 book “Journey of the Universe” and his collaborator on the documentary of the same title, read early drafts of “Cosmogenesis.” She said the book features a personal narrative of a kind that’s not often seen.
“It brings the perspective of someone trained in science and mathematics to bear on why studying the universe scientifically, empirically, or in a reductionist, datadriven manner can dim down our sense of awe, wonder, beauty, complexity and engagement with these processes,” Tucker said in a phone interview.
Building on his exchanges with Berry, Swimme wants to demonstrate that a belief in science doesn’t preclude acknowledging that there’s a spiritual dimension to human life. This is a third rail for many who work in scientific
fields, where avowals of atheism are common.
“We are in a certain sense talking about God,” he said about his use of the word “spiritual,” but “the difficulty with the word God” is that it’s often associated with a rejection of science. “I like to speak in terms of: We’re talking about a universe that’s intelligent. And we’re talking about a universe that is aiming to bring something forth.
“One of my key thinkers is (the late British philosopher and mathematician) Alfred North Whitehead, who says the universe aims at beauty,” he continued. This “isn’t something that can be proven, but I think insights like this can be experienced in an intuitive sense.”
After teaching full time at the California Institute of Integral Studies from 1990 to 2019, Swimme has transitioned to part time. He’s also taken on a leadership role with Human Energy, a nonprofit that, according to its website, aims to inspire a sense of “meaningful unity” among the “global human society.” Swimme knows that some observers will dismiss such notions out of hand, but he thinks it’s perilous to organize a society around the idea that everything can be explained by science.
Such an outlook, he said, “denies meaning. We see it in the confusion and the doubt and the rise in suicides, especially among young people. They’re in search of a larger vision of things. I’m not saying that what I’ve done will be satisfying, but certainly I think that we have a responsibility to provide something larger.
“I have a hard time believing that the universe evolved for 13.8 billion years so we could dedicate our lives to being consumers,” he added. “There just has to be something more going on.”