For over four hundred years, Western civilization has chosen science as its source of truths and wisdom about the mysteries of life. Allegorically, we may picture the wisdom of the universe as resembling a large mountain. We scale the mountain as we acquire knowledge. Our drive to reach the top of that mountain is fueled by the notion that with knowledge we may become “masters” of our universe. Conjure the image of the all-knowing guru seated atop the mountain.

Consciousness, once a topic alluded to only by philosophers and, occasionally, theologians, has – in the past 20 years or so – migrated into the domain of science and rational analysis. But this does not mean to say that conscious experience is now understood in the way that we understand other natural phenomena that were once attributed to otherworldly causes – earthquakes or solar eclipses, for example.

On the contrary, consciousness remains one of the major unsolved problems in science. But science and scientists are gradually becoming able and willing to tackle this phenomenon, to ask pertinent questions, and to use the newly available technology to carry out decisive experiments.

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because we are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.” – Max Planck, “father” of quantum theory

There’s a power that lives in the space “between,” that subtle instant when something ends, and what follows next hasn’t yet begun.

From the birth and death of galaxies, to the beginning and ending of careers and relationships, and even the simplicity of breathing in and out, creation is the story of beginnings and endings: cycles that start and stop, expand and contract, live and die.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century physical science had completed and embellished the “golden age of a mechanistic and deterministic models of the universe” where the universe and its constituents are ruled by rigid interactive forces that can be measured, phenomena that can be predicted using mathematical tools, and where the universe or any system operating within it is made of the sum of its parts.

Light was thought to be an electromagnetic wave vibrating in an undetected, and later experimentally disproved media: “the ether”, at certain rates of vibration that would define its color. It was part of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that allowed one to perceive an electromagnetic wave as heat, light , radio waves, or other electromagnetic radiations depending on the frequency of its vibrations. This spectrum had been well-defined by the equations of the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1864.