Richard Conn Henry: Quotes

Richard Conn Henry (born 7 March 1940 is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of one book and over 200 publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray. He reports being part of a team that discovered "vastly more baryons than had ever before been found in the universe". He is also cited in the effort to re-categorize Pluto as a dwarf planet.

He initially joined the Johns Hopkins University Physics Department in 1968 as the first JHU astronomer since 1908. After a stint at NASA, he returned to help attract in 1981 the Space Telescope Science Institute to JHU, an organization that now employs 500, including 100 PhDs.

More recently he has attracted popular press for the SETI ecliptic search idea, and the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. The SETI ecliptic search idea suggests focusing SETI efforts in the ecliptic plane in which distant hypothetical observers can see the Earth's transit of the sun. The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar is one in which the number of days in a year is always divisible by seven, such that holidays always fall on the same day of the week. Most years have only four quarters of 91 days, while every five or six years an extra week is inserted at the end of December.

He is also active in various organizations, including the Streit Council where as of 2012 he is President; the Maryland Space Grant Consortium; and an organization he founded, The Henry Foundation, which "sponsors improved worldwide understanding of physics". He has a 1967 Ph.D. from Princeton University.

(Matherial from Wikipedia)

The Universe is immaterial:

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.

Historically, we have looked to our religious leaders to understand the meaning of our lives; the nature of our world. With Galileo Galilei, this changed. In establishing that the Earth goes around the Sun, Galileo not only succeeded in believing the unbelievable himself, but also convinced almost everyone else to do the same. This was a stunning accomplishment in ‘physics outreach’ and, with the subsequent work of Isaac Newton, physics joined religion in seeking to explain our place in the Universe.

The more recent physics revolution of the past 80 years has yet to transform general public understanding in a similar way. And yet a correct understanding of physics was accessible even to Pythagoras. According to Pythagoras, “number is all things”, and numbers are men-tal, not mechanical. Likewise, Newton called light “particles”,knowing the concept to be an‘effective theory’ — useful, not true. As noted by Newton’s biographer Richard Westfall: “The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’” Newton knew of Newton’s rings and was untroubled by what is shallowly called ‘wave/particle duality’.

The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental. According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledges heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” But physicists have not yet followed Galileo’s example, and convinced everyone of the wonders of quantum mechanics. As Sir Arthur Eddington explained: “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”

Physicists shy from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics. A common way to evade the mental Universe is to invoke ‘decoherence’ — the notion that ‘the physical environment’ issufficient to create reality, independent of the human mind. Yet the idea that anyirreversible act of amplification is necessary to collapse the wave function is known to be wrong: in ‘Renninger-type’experiments, the wave function is col-lapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. The Universe is entirely mental.

One benefit of switching humanity to a correct perception of the world is the resulting joy of discovering the mental nature of the Universe. We have no idea what this mental nature implies, but — the great thing is— it is true.

There is another benefit of seeing the world as quantum mechanical: someone who has learned to accept that nothing exists but observations is far ahead of peers who stumble through physics hoping to find out ‘what things are’. If we can‘pull a Galileo,’ and get people believing the truth, they will find physics a breeze.

The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.