In June 1938, the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a letter from Paris to his Jewish friend Gershom Scholem in which he quoted from Arthur S. Eddington's book "Weltbild der Physik", which was published in 1934. Eddington goes into the insights of his science, and it seems to him "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a physicist to pass through a threshold", after all, a "board has no solid substance", as the quantum theory of atoms can show.
Benjamin senses the paradox of science. It turns out that the insights of physics confront people with a reality that they can hardly experience. This leads them to familiarize themselves with the opposite of science, namely the tradition of mysticism. In the Jewish version, this allows the idea that there are secrets in the world that remain. Those who want to find their way into its innermost depths must reckon with the fact that scientific explanations do not lift any secrets - do not lift the veil that lies over the truth - but rather deepen the miraculous.
The world is not disenchanted by science; on the contrary, it is enchanted. Whoever replaces the familiar with a mystery romanticizes the world, as Novalis would say, which allows us to point out that the historical replacement of mystical thinking by rational argumentation is lifted thanks to quantum theory and that both efforts of people to gain knowledge become equal.
Since the upheaval in the world view of physics, people have been living in a complementary world with its own field of tension full of secrets from which they can draw their creativity, as Albert Einstein said. When Eddington tried to explain in his book that atoms are above all insubstantial, Einstein recognized the opposite, namely that the empty space between them must be filled with physical effects. Somehow, inside and outside complement each other in the atomic sphere, as Goethe states in a riddle poem: "In contemplating nature, one must always respect one thing as everything. Nothing is inside, nothing is outside, for what is inside is outside. So seize without delay, sacred public mystery." He brings the traditionally mystical into contemporary science, which feels good. What more could a curious person want?
