Awe Without Illusions

Sagan, Einstein, and the Discipline of Wonder

An acquaintance sent me a video with her New Year’s wishes titled Carl Sagan’s spiritual side. I liked it and so I googled a bit further and found that many videos and transcripts now circulate online under the same heading. The framing is very well-intentioned but, in my humble view, also slightly misleading. It suggests a hidden dimension, a concession to religion, or a quiet retreat from science into something softer.

In fact, Carl Sagan was doing almost the opposite. He was insisting that science, taken seriously enough, already carries all the depth, humility, and emotional gravity that people often seek elsewhere.

What he offered was not spirituality instead of science, but a way of inhabiting science without becoming either cynical or metaphysical.

I. Spirituality without the supernatural

Sagan used the word spiritual carefully and sparingly. When he did, he did not mean belief in gods, hidden purposes, or unseen realms. He meant the human response to scale, structure, and intelligibility — the quiet shock of realizing what kind of universe we actually inhabit.

For Sagan, the universe did not become meaningful because it broke its own laws. It became meaningful because it has laws — stable, discoverable, astonishingly productive ones. The miracle was not that anything supernatural intervened, but that matter organized itself into stars, chemistry, life, and eventually minds capable of asking how any of this came to be.

That is not mysticism. It is respect for reality.

II. Wonder as a disciplined response

One of Sagan’s most enduring insights was that wonder is not something science erodes. It is something science trains. Childlike amazement fades quickly; informed amazement deepens with every layer of understanding.

A star does not become less beautiful once you understand nuclear fusion.
It becomes more demanding of your attention.

Sagan rejected the idea that seriousness requires emotional distance. He also rejected the opposite idea: that emotion should outrun evidence. His stance was subtler and harder to maintain. Feel deeply — but only about what you have taken the time to understand.

In that sense, wonder was not a mood. It was a discipline.

III. Einstein’s earlier echo

Long before Sagan, Albert Einstein struggled with similar language. When Einstein spoke of a “cosmic religious feeling,” he was not gesturing toward theology. He was pointing to an attitude: humility before order, gratitude for intelligibility, and suspicion of all claims to final certainty.

Einstein’s “mysterious” was not the supernatural. It was the fact that the universe is lawful at all — that abstract reasoning can reach into nature and come back with equations that work.

Sagan did not add much to this philosophically. What he added was clarity of expression, historical context, and a modern voice. If Einstein articulated the posture, Sagan taught generations how to stand in it.

IV. Meaning without guarantees

Neither Einstein nor Sagan believed the universe hands out meaning. The cosmos does not whisper instructions, assign destinies, or promise moral closure. That indifference is not bleak; it is simply honest.

Meaning, on this view, is not discovered like a buried artifact. It is constructed through attention, responsibility, and choice. We care not because the universe demands it, but because we can.

This is where both men quietly diverge from religion and from nihilism alike. There is no cosmic judge — but there is also no excuse to stop caring. The absence of guarantees does not empty life of significance. It places significance squarely in human hands.

That shift is not comforting in the usual sense. It is steadier.

V. Why this still matters

In an age saturated with noise, instant explanations, and synthetic forms of transcendence, Sagan’s voice still feels unusually calm. Not because he offered reassurance, but because he refused shortcuts.

Pay attention.
Learn carefully.
Stay curious.
Accept uncertainty without romanticizing it.

That combination — wonder without illusion, humility without surrender — is rare. It asks more of us than belief systems do. But it also gives more back: a way to stand in the universe without pretending it owes us anything.

Sagan’s spirituality, like Einstein’s before him, was not about escape. It was about orientation. About learning how to look outward without losing intellectual honesty, and inward without inventing metaphysics.

If that still feels “spiritual,” it is only because reality, understood clearly enough, is already more than enough.

Physics Without Consolations

On Quantum Mechanics, Meaning, and the Limits of Metaphysical Inquiry

This post is a rewritten version of an essay I published on this blog in September 2020 under the title “The End of Physics.” The original text captured a conviction I still hold: that quantum mechanics is strange but not mysterious, and that much of what is presented as metaphysical depth in modern physics is better understood as interpretive excess. What has changed since then is not the substance of that conviction, but the way I think it should be expressed.

Over the past years, I have revisited several of my physics papers in dialogue with artificial intelligence — not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a tool for clarification, consistency checking, and tone correction. This post is an experiment of the same kind: returning to an older piece of writing with the help of AI, asking not “was I wrong?” but “can this be said more precisely, more calmly, and with fewer rhetorical shortcuts?”

The result is not a repudiation of the 2020 text (and similar ones here on this blog site, or on my ResearchGate page) but a refinement of it.
If there is progress here, it lies not in new claims about physics, but in a clearer separation between what physics tells us about the world and what humans sometimes want it to tell us.

— Jean Louis Van Belle
1 January 2026

After the Mysteries: Physics Without Consolations

For more than a century now, quantum mechanics has been presented as a realm of deep and irreducible mystery. We are told that nature is fundamentally unknowable, that particles do not exist until observed, that causality breaks down at the smallest scales, and that reality itself is somehow suspended in a fog of probabilities.

Yet this way of speaking says more about us than about physics.

Quantum mechanics is undeniably strange. But strange is not the same as mysterious. The equations work extraordinarily well, and — more importantly — we have perfectly adequate physical interpretations for what they describe. Wavefunctions are not metaphysical ghosts. They encode physical states, constraints, and statistical regularities in space and time. Particles such as photons, electrons, and protons are not abstract symbols floating in Hilbert space; they are real physical systems whose behavior can be described using familiar concepts: energy, momentum, charge, field structure, stability.

No additional metaphysics is required.

Over time, however, physics acquired something like a priesthood of interpretation. Mathematical formalisms were promoted from tools to truths. Provisional models hardened into ontologies. Concepts introduced for calculational convenience were treated as if they had to exist — quarks, virtual particles, many worlds — not because experiment demanded it, but because the formalism allowed it.

This is not fraud. It is human behavior.

The Comfort of Indeterminism

There is another, less discussed reason why quantum mechanics became mystified. Indeterminism offered something deeply attractive: a perceived escape hatch from a fully ordered universe.

For some, this meant intellectual freedom. For others, moral freedom. And for some — explicitly or implicitly — theological breathing room.

It is not an accident that indeterminism was welcomed in cultural environments shaped by religious traditions. Many prominent physicists of the twentieth century were embedded — socially, culturally, or personally — in Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant worlds. A universe governed strictly by deterministic laws had long been seen as hostile to divine action, prayer, or moral responsibility. Quantum “uncertainty” appeared to reopen a door that classical physics seemed to have closed.

The institutional embrace of this framing is telling. The Vatican showed early enthusiasm for modern cosmology and quantum theory, just as it did for the Big Bang model — notably developed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest as well as a physicist. The Big Bang fit remarkably well with a creation narrative, and quantum indeterminism could be read as preserving divine freedom in a lawful universe.

None of this proves that physics was distorted intentionally. But it does show that interpretations do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by psychological needs, cultural background, and inherited metaphysical anxieties.

Determinism, Statistics, and Freedom

Rejecting metaphysical indeterminism does not mean endorsing a cold, mechanical universe devoid of choice or responsibility.

Statistical determinism is not fatalism.

Complex systems — from molecules to brains to societies — exhibit emergent behavior that is fully lawful and yet unpredictable in detail. Free will does not require violations of physics; it arises from self-organizing structures capable of evaluation, anticipation, and choice. Moral responsibility is not rescued by randomness. In fact, randomness undermines responsibility far more than lawfulness ever did.

Consciousness, too, does not need mystery to be meaningful. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena we know precisely because it emerges from matter organizing itself into stable, recursive, adaptive patterns. The same principles operate at every scale: atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in organisms, organisms in ecosystems — and, increasingly, artificial systems embedded in human-designed environments.

There is no voice speaking to us from outside the universe. But there is meaning, agency, and responsibility arising from within it.

Progress Without Revelation

It is sometimes said that physics is advancing at an unprecedented pace. In a technical sense, this is true. But conceptually, the situation is more sobering.

Most of the technologies we rely on today — semiconductors, lasers, superconductors, waveguides — were already conceptually understood by the mid-twentieth century and are clearly laid out in The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Later developments refined, scaled, and engineered these ideas, but they did not introduce fundamentally new physical principles.

Large experimental programs have confirmed existing theories with extraordinary precision. That achievement deserves respect. But confirmation is not revelation. Precision is not profundity.

Recognizing this is not pessimism. It is intellectual honesty.

After Physics Ends

If there is an “end of physics,” it is not the end of inquiry, technology, or wonder. It is the end of physics as a source of metaphysical consolation. The end of physics as theology by other means.

What remains is enough: a coherent picture of the material world, an understanding of how complexity and consciousness arise, and the responsibility that comes with knowing there is no external guarantor of meaning.

We are on our own — but not lost.

And that, perhaps, is the most mature scientific insight of all.

Perhaps we will stop here – time will tell :-)

I have just uploaded a new working paper to ResearchGate: Ontology, Physics, and Math – Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. I am not announcing it with any sense of urgency, nor with the expectation that it will “change” physics. If it contributes anything at all, it may simply offer a bit of clarity about what we can reasonably claim to see in physics — and what we merely calculate, fit, or postulate. That distinction has preoccupied me for years.

A space to think

One unexpected consequence of taking AI seriously over the past one or two years is that it restored something I had quietly lost: a space to think.

Not a space to produce.
Not a space to publish.
Not a space to compete.

Just a space to think — slowly, carefully, without having to defend a position before it has fully formed. That kind of space has become rare. Academia is under pressure, industry is under pressure, and even independent thinkers often feel compelled to rush toward closure. The conversations I’ve had with AI — what I’ve come to call a corridor — were different. They were not about winning arguments, but about keeping the corridor open only where conceptual clarity survived.

In a strange way, this brought me back to something much older than AI. When I was young, I wanted to study philosophy. My father refused. I had failed my mathematics exam for engineering studies, and in his view philosophy without mathematics was a dead end. In retrospect, I can see that he was probably right — and also that he struggled with me as much as I struggled with him. He should perhaps have pushed me into mathematics earlier; I should perhaps have worked harder. But life does not run backward, and neither does understanding. What AI unexpectedly gave me, decades later, was the chance to reunite those two threads: conceptual questioning disciplined by mathematical restraint. Not philosophy as free-floating speculation, and not mathematics as pure formalism — but something closer to what physics once called natural philosophy.

Why I was always uncomfortable

For a long time, I could not quite place my discomfort. I was uneasy with mainstream Standard Model theorists — not because their work lacks brilliance or empirical success (it clearly does not), but because formal success increasingly seemed to substitute for ontological clarity. At the same time, I felt equally uneasy among outsiders and “fringe” thinkers, who were often too eager to replace one elaborate ontology with another, convinced that the establishment had simply missed the obvious.

I now think I understand why I could not belong comfortably to either camp. Both, in different ways, tend to underestimate what went into building the Standard Model in the first place.

The Standard Model is not just a theory. It is the result of enormous societal investment (yes, taxes matter), decades of engineering ingenuity, and entire academic ecosystems built around measurement, refinement, and internal consistency. One does not wave that away lightly. Criticizing it without acknowledging that effort is not radical — it is careless.
At the same time, acknowledging that effort does not oblige one to treat the resulting ontology as final. Formal closure is not the same thing as physical understanding.

That tension — respect without reverence — is where I found myself stuck.

Seeing versus calculating

The paper I just uploaded does not attempt to overthrow the Standard Model, nor to replace ΛCDM, nor to propose a new unification. It does something much more modest: it tries to separate what we can physically interpret from what we can formally manipulate.

That distinction was central to the worries of people like Albert Einstein, long before it became unfashionable to worry about such things. Einstein’s famous remark to Max Born — “God does not play dice” — was not a rejection of probability as a calculational tool. It was an expression of discomfort with mistaking a formalism for a description of reality. Something similar motivated Louis de Broglie, and later thinkers who never quite accepted that interpretation should be outsourced entirely to mathematics.

What my paper argues — cautiously, and without claiming finality — is that much of modern physics suffers from a kind of ontological drift: symmetries that began life as mathematical operations sometimes came to be treated as physical mandates.

When those symmetries fail, new quantum numbers, charges, or conservation laws are introduced to restore formal order. This works extraordinarily well — but it also risks confusing bookkeeping with explanation.

Matter, antimatter, and restraint

The most difficult part of the paper concerns matter–antimatter creation and annihilation. For a long time, I resisted interpretations that treated charge as something that could simply appear or disappear. That resistance did not lead me to invent hidden reservoirs or speculative intermediates — on the contrary, I explicitly rejected such moves as ontological inflation. Instead, I left the tension open.

Only later did I realize that insisting on charge as a substance may itself have been an unjustified metaphor. Letting go of that metaphor did not solve everything — but it did restore coherence without adding entities. That pattern — refusing both cheap dismissal and cheap solutions — now feels like the right one.

Ambition, patience, and time

We live in a period of extraordinary measurement and, paradoxically, diminished understanding. Data accumulates. Precision improves. Parameters are refined. But the underlying picture often becomes more fragmented rather than more unified.

New machines may or may not be built. China may or may not build the next CERN. That is largely beyond the control of individual thinkers. What is within reach is the slower task of making sense of what we already know. That task does not reward ambition. It rewards patience.

This is also where I part ways — gently, but firmly — with some bright younger thinkers and some older, semi-wise ones. Not because they are wrong in detail, but because they sometimes underestimate the weight of history, infrastructure, and collective effort behind the theories they critique or attempt to replace. Time will tell whether their alternatives mature. Time always tells :-). […] PS: I add a ‘smiley’ here because, perhaps, that is the most powerful phrase of all in this post.

A pause, not a conclusion

This paper may mark the end of my own physics quest — or at least a pause. Not because everything is resolved, but because I finally understand why I could neither fully accept nor fully reject what I was given. I don’t feel compelled anymore to choose sides. I can respect the Standard Model without canonizing it, and I can question it without trying to dethrone it. I can accept that some questions may remain open, not because we lack data, but because clarity sometimes requires restraint.

For now, that feels like enough. Time to get back on the bike. 🙂

PS: Looking back at earlier philosophical notes I wrote years ago — for instance on the relation between form, substance, and charge — I’m struck less by how “wrong” they were than by how unfinished they remained. The questions were already there; what was missing was discipline. Not more speculation, but sharper restraint.

Stability First: A Personal Programme for Re-reading Particle Physics

Over the past years, I have written a number of papers on physics—mostly exploratory, sometimes speculative, always driven by the same underlying discomfort.

Not with the results of modern physics. Those are extraordinary.
But with the ordering of its explanations.

We are very good at calculating what happens.
We are less clear about why some things persist and others do not.

That question—why stability appears where it does—has quietly guided much of my thinking. It is also the thread that ties together a new manuscript I have just published on ResearchGate:

“Manuscript v0.2 – A stability-first reinterpretation of particle physics”
👉 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398839393_Manuscript_v02

This post is not a summary of the manuscript. It is an explanation of why I wrote it, and what kind of work it is meant to enable.

Not a new theory — a different starting point

Let me be clear from the outset.

This manuscript does not propose a new theory.
It does not challenge the empirical success of the Standard Model.
It does not attempt to replace quantum field theory or nuclear phenomenology.

What it does is much more modest—and, I hope, more durable.

It asks whether we have been starting our explanations at the wrong end.

Instead of beginning with abstract constituents and symmetries, the manuscript begins with something far more pedestrian, yet physically decisive:

Persistence in time.

Some entities last.
Some decay.
Some exist only fleetingly as resonances.
Some are stable only in the presence of others.

Those differences are not cosmetic. They shape the physical world we actually inhabit.

From electrons to nuclei: stability as a guide

The manuscript proceeds slowly and deliberately, revisiting familiar ground:

the electron, as an intrinsically stable mode;
the proton, as a geometrically stable but structurally richer object;
the neutron, as a metastable configuration whose stability exists only in relation;
the deuteron, as the simplest genuinely collective equilibrium;
and nuclear matter, where stability becomes distributed across many coupled degrees of freedom.

At no point is new empirical content introduced.
What changes is the interpretive emphasis.

Stability is treated not as an afterthought, but as a physical clue.

Interaction without mysticism

The same approach is applied to interaction.

Scattering and annihilation are reinterpreted not as abstract probabilistic events, but as temporary departures from equilibrium and mode conversion between matter-like and light-like regimes.

Nothing in the standard calculations is altered.
What is altered is the physical picture.

Wavefunctions remain indispensable—but they are treated as representations of physical configurations, not as substitutes for them.

Probability emerges naturally from limited access to phase, geometry, and configuration, rather than from assumed ontological randomness.

Why classification matters

The manuscript ultimately turns to the Particle Data Group catalogue.

The PDG tables are one of the great achievements of modern physics. But they are optimized for calculation, not for intuition about persistence.

The manuscript proposes a complementary, stability-first index of the same data:

intrinsically stable modes,
metastable particle modes,
prompt decayers,
resonances,
and context-dependent stability (such as neutrons in nuclei).

Nothing is removed.
Nothing is denied.

The proposal is simply to read the catalogue as a map of stability regimes, rather than as a flat ontology of “fundamental particles”.

A programme statement, not a conclusion

This manuscript is intentionally incomplete.

It does not contain the “real work” of re-classifying the entire PDG catalogue. That work lies ahead and will take time, iteration, and—no doubt—many corrections.

What the manuscript provides is something else:

a programme statement.

A clear declaration of what kind of questions I think are still worth asking in particle physics, and why stability—rather than constituent bookkeeping—may be the right place to ask them from.

Why I am sharing this now

I am publishing this manuscript not as a final product, but as a marker.

A marker of a line of thought I intend to pursue seriously.
A marker of a way of reading familiar physics that I believe remains underexplored.
And an invitation to discussion—especially critical discussion—on whether this stability-first perspective is useful, coherent, or ultimately untenable.

Physics progresses by calculation.
It matures by interpretation.

This manuscript belongs to the second category.

If that resonates with you, you may find the full text of interest.

Jean-Louis Van Belle
readingfeynman.org

Beautiful Blind Nonsense

I didn’t plan to write this short article or blog post. But as often happens these days, a comment thread on LinkedIn nudged me into it — or rather, into a response that became this article (which I also put on LinkedIn).

Someone posted a bold, poetic claim about “mass being memory,” “resonant light shells,” and “standing waves of curved time.” They offered a graphic spiraling toward meaning, followed by the words: “This isn’t metaphysics. It’s measurable.”

I asked politely:
“Interesting. Article, please? How do you get these numbers?”

The response: a full PDF of a “Unified Field Theory” relying on golden-ratio spirals, new universal constants, and reinterpretations of Planck’s constant. I read it. I sighed. And I asked ChatGPT a simple question:

“Why is there so much elegant nonsense being published lately — and does AI help generate it?”

The answer that followed was articulate, clear, and surprisingly quotable. So I polished it slightly, added some structure, and decided: this deserves to be an article in its own right. So here it is.

Beautiful, but Blind: How AI Amplifies Both Insight and Illusion

In recent years, a new kind of scientific-sounding poetry has flooded our screens — elegant diagrams, golden spirals, unified field manifestos. Many are written not by physicists, but with the help of AI.

And therein lies the paradox: AI doesn’t know when it’s producing nonsense.

🤖 Pattern without Understanding

Large language models like ChatGPT or Grok are trained on enormous text corpora. They are experts at mimicking patterns — but they lack an internal model of truth.
So if you ask them to expand on “curved time as the field of God,” they will.

Not because it’s true. But because it’s linguistically plausible.

🎼 The Seductive Surface of Language

AI is disarmingly good at rhetorical coherence:

Sentences flow logically.
Equations are beautifully formatted.
Metaphors bridge physics, poetry, and philosophy.

This surface fluency can be dangerously persuasive — especially when applied to concepts that are vague, untestable, or metaphysically confused.

🧪 The Missing Ingredient: Constraint

Real science is not just elegance — it’s constraint:

Equations must be testable.
Constants must be derivable or measurable.
Theories must make falsifiable predictions.

AI doesn’t impose those constraints on its own. It needs a guide.

🧭 The Human Role: Resonance and Resistance

Used carelessly, AI can generate hyper-coherent gibberish. But used wisely — by someone trained in reasoning, skepticism, and clarity — it becomes a powerful tool:

To sharpen ideas.
To test coherence.
To contrast metaphor with mechanism.

In the end, AI reflects our inputs.
It doesn’t distinguish between light and noise — unless we do.