Jonathan Allday

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

That's an interesting question, and I think the honest answer is for much of my career, it it kind of didn't, because although the journey was happening, it wasn't a journey that I was aware of at at the time. But it would leak through occasionally.

So particularly if you're a physics teacher, I'm I'm sure it's true for other, but it seems more seems to come up a little bit more as a physics teacher that, you know, a student will sometimes say, why did you do physics? As if, oh, why would anybody? And I I kind of got used to saying, oh, because I really like light bulbs, you know, or or something like that, and I thought that's not adequate. And then I started. I just adopted the because I hope one day I'll understand mind. And that kind of, a, what? And so I said, well, you know, the laws of nature have created us. They've created human beings. So somewhere in the laws of nature, somewhere down the line, there is a consequence that consciousness exists in this universe. Not physics that we know it now, but at some point, that has to be worked through. So it just gave me the opportunity to say say that, but but at the time that wasn't really connected to an interiority journey. That was just something I said, and I meant it and I believed it, but it wasn't personal in that same sense. It is now. I see the value of the interiority, but it was always part of.

I have two friends who were in the years the year below me at school. They both went on to be professors at two different universities, professors of physics. It was just an extraordinary grouping of three, four people at the school at the same time. We all had these good careers in physics, and they went on to be professors of physics. And, you know, occasionally talked to one that I'm in more contact with, and say, you know, okay, cards on the table, what do you think about measurement problem, quantum theory, the meaning of that? Never comes up. Never comes up. In thirty years in physics, we never talk about it. Why are you doing physics if you don't want to talk about that?

The books I value more than any other. Yeah. Very important book to me. I've I've found it in a moment of high anxiety, and it, helped. And it's a constant back reference now. I particularly value Eddington.

His words are rich to me don't discount the possibility that the study of physics is a spiritual path of itself.

That we all people who have been far, far more creative than myself in physics, but I experience their experiences by proxy. That moment when you see the universe's structure open up in front of you in a limited way, when Dirac makes his advance, or when Heisenberg makes his advance, or whoever that moment, joy and clarity of Einstein spoke of so eloquently, and that those of us who follow in their wake and study their work and say, oh, god. What must it have been like? Or, you know, in our own little bit of research, when you have that moment, when it becomes clear. Ask where that comes from.

Just that one question. Don't just say, oh, that was nice and move on. Just ask that question, where does that come from?

I guess I was in many ways more of a philosopher who happened to be good at physics rather than a physicist. That will be a better way of characterizing me, I sometimes think.