The Sleepwalkers Quotes

“Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because orthodox astronomy had already been broken up by Kepler and orthodox physics by Galileo; reading a new pattern into the shambles, he united them in a new conceptual frame. Similarly, chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, thus destroying its own classic concept of matter, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“They were aware that the symbols of mythology and the the symbols of mathematical science were different aspects of the same, indivisible Reality. They did not live in a 'divided house of faith and reason'; the two were interlocking, like ground-plan and elevation on an architect's drawing. It is a state of mind very difficult for twentieth-century man to imagine- or even to believe that it could ever have existed. It may help to remember though, that some of the greatest pre-Socratic sages formulated their philosophies in verse; the unitary source of inspiration of prophet, poet, and philosopher was still taken for granted.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime.
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“We are in the habit of visualizing .. the history of science as a steady, cumulative process,.. where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height.. In fact, .. the philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries .. were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.. Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“But it is doubtful whether it is permissible to say that the electron 'occupies space' at all. Atoms have the capacity of swallowing energy and of spitting out energy - in the form of light rays, for instance. When a hydrogen atom, the simplest of all, with a single electron-planet, swallows energy, the planet jumps from its orbit to a larger orbit - say, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars; when it emits energy, it jumps back into the smaller orbit. But these jumps are performed by the planet without it passing through the space that separates the two orbits. It somehow de-materializes in orbit A and re-materializes in orbit B. Moreover, since the amount of 'action' performed by the hydrogen electron while going once round its orbit is the indivisibly smallest quantum of action (Planck's basic constant 'h'), it is meaningless to ask at what precise point of its orbit the electron is at a given moment of time. It is equally everywhere.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The habits and learning potentialities of all species are fixed within the narrow limits which the structure of its nervous system and organs permits; those of homo sapiens seem unlimited precisely because the possible uses of the evolutionary novelty in his skull were quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked.

The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum, at 135 seconds arc per day. The ratio between the two extreme velocities is 106 to 135, which only differs by two seconds from 4:5. - the major third. With similar, very small deviations (which were all perfectly explained away at the end), the ratio of Jupiter's slowest to its fastest motion is a minor third, Mars' the quint, and so forth. So much for each planet considered by itself. But when he compared the extreme angular velocities of pairs of different planets, the results were even marvellous:

"At the first glance the Sun of Harmony broke in all its clarity through the clouds."

The extreme values yield in fact the intervals of the complete scale. But not enough: if we start with the outermost planet, Saturn, in the aphelion, the scale will be in the major key; if we start with Saturn in the perihelion, it will be in the minor key. Lastly, if several planets are simultaneously at the extreme points of their respective orbits, the result is a motet where Saturn and Jupiter represent the bass, Mars the tenor, Earth and Venus the contralto, Mercury the soprano. On some occasions all six can be heard together:”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The Harmony of the World is the continuation of tye Cosmic Mystery, and the climax of his lifelong obsession. What Kepler attempted here is, simply, to bare the ultimate secret of the universe in an all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy, and epistemology. It was the firat attempt of this kind since Plato, and it is the last to our day. After Kepler, fragmentation of experience sets in again, science is divorced from religion, religion from art, substance from form, matter from mind.

The work is divided into five books. The first two deal with the concept of harmony in mathematics; the following three with the applications of this concept to music, astrology, and astronomy, in that order.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics - some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the 'obvious', and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think?”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process. It leads not only to a reevaluation of the problem itself, but often to a synthesis of much wider consequences, brought about by a fusion of the two previously unrelated frames of reference. In our case, the orbit of Mars became the unifying link between the two formerly seperate realms of physics and cosmology.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“And yet, by three incorrect steps and their even more correct defence, Kepler stumbled on the correct law. It is perhaps the most amazing sleep-walking performance in the history of science-except for the manner in which he found his First Law, to which we now turn.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Thus only the pattern is cosmically determined, not any particular event; within that pattern, man is free. In his later years, this Gestalt concept of cosmic destiny became more abstract and purified from dross. The individual soul, which bears the potential imprint of the entire sky, reacts to the light coming from the planets according to the angles they form with each other, and the geometrical harmonies or disharmonies that result - just as the ear reacts to the mathematical harmonies of music, and the eye to the harmonies of colour. This capacity of the soul to act as a cosmic resonator has a mystic and a causal aspect: on the one hand it affirms the soul's affinity with the anima mundi, on the other, it makes it subject to strictly mathematical laws. At this point, Kepler's particular brand of astrology merges into his all-embracing and unifying Pythagorean vision of the Harmony of the Spheres.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The myopic child, who sometimes saw the world doubled or quadrupled, became the founder of modern optics (the word 'dioptries' on the oculist's prescription is derived from the title of one of Kepler's books); the man who could only see clearly at a short distance, invented the modern astronomical telescope. We shall have occassion to watch the working of this magic dynamo, which transforms pain into achievement and curses into blessings.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passion, and the principle link between man and divinity.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic's brain.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment..”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Every creative act involves... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.”
― Arthur Koestler , The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“We are indeed a blind race,' wrote a contemporary scientist, 'and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial 'waves of probability' marking out 'disturbed areas' where an electron is likely to 'occur'. They are as immaterial as the waves of depression, loyalty, suicide, and so on, that sweep over a country ' From here there is only one step to calling them abstract, mental, or brain waves in the Universal Mind - without irony.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Or one can visualize the process as follows: as the planet approaches the sun, its speed increases. It shoots past the sun, but as it does so, the clutching hand of gravity swings it round - as a running child grabbing at a maypole is swung around it - so that it now continues in the opposite direction. If its velocity on the approach-run had been exactly the amount required to prevent it from falling into the sun, it would continue in a circle. But as it was slightly greater, the receding run will carry it into an elongated path, which the planet pursues at slackening speed in the teeth of the sun's attraction, as it were, gradually curving inward; until, after passing the aphelion, the curve again approaches the sun and the whole cycle starts again.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The fact that his discoveries are found in it once more side by side with his fantasies, does not detract from its value. It is precisely this overlapping of two universe of thought, which gives the Epitome, as it does to the whole of Kepler's life and work, its unique value to the history of ideas.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“A fact, once discovered, leads an existence of its own, and enters into relations with other facts of which their discoverers have never dreamt. Apollonius of Perga discovered the laws of the useless curves which emerge when a plane intersects a cone at various angles: these curves proved, centuries later, to represent the paths followed by planets, comets, rockets, and satellites.

One cannot escape the feeling [wrote Heinrich Herz] that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

This confession of the discoverer of radio-waves sounds suspiciously like an echo of Kepler, echoing Plato, echoing Pythagoras: 'Methinks that all of nature and the graceful sky are set into symbols in geomatriam.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which, through discordant tensions, through sincopes and cadenzas, as it were (as men employ them in imitation of those natural discords), progresses towards certain pre-designed, quasi six-voiced clausuras, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is, therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time within a short hour, by an artful symphony for several voices, to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His Works, and to partake of his joy by making music in the imitation of God.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe