The situation in which people live today is “schizophrenic”, said Hans-Peter Duerr, physicist-philosopher, here on Tuesday.
Mr. Duerr, former executive director of Max Planck Institute for Physics (Werner Heisenberg Institute), Global Challenge Network (GCN), delivered a lecture on “Dynamic sustainability, let the living become more alive” at the head office of the Corporation Bank.
He said the schizophrenic situation that people lived was owing to “having a mindset of the 19th century, technology of the 20th century and our commission to shape the 21st century”.
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On the relevance of physics, he quoted German physicist Werner Heisenberg as saying that quantum theory was such a wonderful example for a subject that one could understand simply in complex clarity and at the same time, realise that one could only talk about it in terms of images and metaphors.
“Science speaks only in terms of metaphors and new relationships between religion and sciences,” he said.
Mr. Duerr said that in the new world of science, modern view was to reduce differences between various disciplines of science and humanities and to establish bridges between science and religion.
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Mr. Durr said that religion was an image and every people thought that the image they had was right “and different religions fight each other, which is complete nonsense”.
Narrating his six-decade-old study of matter, Mr. Durr said that he worked on the subject of matter, on how it worked and how it was connected, for 60 years. When people would ask him what came of the study, he would reply, “Matter does not exist.”
He said some people would then wonder how he worked for 60 years on something that did not exist.
The website on the Right Livelihood Award says that Mr. Durr received the award in 1987 for “his profound critique of the strategic defence initiative (SDI) and his work to convert high technology to peaceful uses.”