A Language Beyond Reason
“The fundamental tragedy of the human condition is that we are sentient, sensitive, meaning-driven beings in a universe that is overwhelmingly mindless, insensate and random.”
I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and had translated the correspondence between the two men—letters of great importance and interest to the history of science—into English. A proud atheist, she always rejected any talk of the spiritual as superstitious nonsense. And yet when I visited her on her deathbed, she admitted with
