Physics and Vertical Causation

Wolfgang Smith was born in Vienna in 1930. At age eighteen he graduated from Cornell University with majors in physics, mathematics, and philosophy. At age twenty he received his Master's degree in theoretical physics from Purdue University, and climbed the Matterhorn.

After contributing to the theoretical solution of the re-entry problem as an aerodynamicist at Bell Aircraft Corporation, Smith earned his doctorate in Mathematics at Columbia University, subsequently embarking upon a 30-year career as a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University.

Above all, however, it needs to be realized that despite his impeccable credentials in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, Wolfgang Smith is at heart an outsider not only in regard to these academic disciplines, but more profoundly, in reference to the post-Enlightenment premises of our contemporary world. Early in life he became deeply attracted to the Platonist and Neoplatonist schools, and subsequently undertook extensive sojourns in India and the Himalayan regions to contact such vestiges of ancient tradition as still could be found. And one of the basic lessons he learned by way of these encounters is that there actually exist higher sciences in which man himself plays the part not merely of the observer, but of the "scientific instrument": becomes himself, in other words, the "microscope" or "telescope" by which he is enabled to perceive hitherto invisible reaches of the integral cosmos. By the same token, moreover, Smith came to recognize the stringent limitations to which our contemporary sciences are subject by virtue of their "extrinsic" modus operandi: the folly of presuming to fathom the depths of the universe having barely scratched the surface in the discovery of man himself.