We concluded the third chapter by dealing with David Bohm's interpretation of quantum. Variously known as "pilot wave" "undivided whole" or "hidden variables" interpretation, for Bohm's main premise to work, one has to consider non-locality as a possibility, one has to accept, in other words, that the common sense notions of causality do not work in the atomic world. Within this second section of the book we will come back and look at Bohm's ideas more in depth. For the time being, it suffices that we refresh our memory for a while, even if in a rather cursory manner, we covered Bohm's work in the third chapter, then what we definitely did not examine upon is Bohm's biography.

While most scientists offer two paradigms, the are either triumphant and remembered or fail and are forgotten, and while they might offer a handful of amusing anecdotes and a baker's dozen of witty or strange quotes, for the most part, their lives are uninteresting. As with artists, whose lives, though considerably more promiscuous and perhaps more adventurous, what one should care for in the life of science is the working of an individual mind. The latter is of course contained in the work. So just as people will return to Shakespeare, though there is little to be known about the man himself, people will return to Einstein, not because of the pose that he affected towards his latter years, but because like Shakespeare or Dante, Einstein provided us not merely with a unique way to contemplate the world, but also with a unique process by which to discover things about the world. In fact, other than the results of Einstein's thought experiments, the most amazing thing about the man is that he was able to formulate them as such in the first place. Ultimately, they reveal a fresh mind, ineffable and inexorable.

In some cases, however, historical circumstances might intersect an artist's or an scientist's biography. The data we reap then from such intersection, while it might not be all too illuminating as far as the scientist or artist work is concerned, definitely shines quite a lamp upon the culture and institutions which surrounded the subject of the biography. While many artists would be impossible, or nearly impossible to understand without understanding the institutions that surrounded them (imagine reading Dante without the slightest idea of Florentine history?), with scientists really the only thing that we can hope to gain from a life is to understand the ways in which the scientific community as well as its hubs, think tanks and universities functioned and the ways in which they either fostered or impeded a particular project's process and fate or a particular idea's fortune.

David Bohm's biography, unfortunately, does not paint a pretty picture for either colleagues or institutions. While the literature on Bohm's work is, if not extensive, then decent, there is not yet a full-fledged biography of him yet. The outline of it, however, is quite familiar and as far as the first half is concerned, quite unremarkable. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on 1917, he became interested in science as a child through reading science fiction. Eventually he moved on to astronomy books and got his formal training, first, in Pennsylvania State College and then moved to University of California, Berkeley and studied under Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer brought him along to Los Alamos to work, along with most prominent physicists and physics graduate students of the time, in the Manhattan Project. Like so many of the children of the depression, Bohm, understandably developed Marxist leanings. By the time he left the Manhattan project, he landed a job at Princeton where he wrote what still remains one of the most accessible textbooks on the Copenhagen interpretations of quantum.

The year that his book was published, however, is the same year when we encounter that disturbing intersection of historical fact, institutional blindness and personal misfortune. Few years after Los Alamos, once the war was over, the Unites States plunged into its red scare. The catalysts of this scare were misinformation and propaganda. If one wishes to give an exact date to the cold war, one would have to go back to the week of February 9 and 16 of 1946. The first date only marks one of Stalin's most demagogic speeches. He blamed "monopoly capitalism" for WWII and argued that capitalism should have been replaces by communism if future wars were to be avoided. While Stalin's speech seemed as blatant animosity veiling an implied threat, the telegram which George F. Kennan, the minister-counselor from the American embassy in Moscow, sent - now known as the Long telegram - definitely sealed the cold war. In it, Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union was an "oriental despotism" in which "extremism was the normal form of rule and foreigners were expected to be mortal enemies." According to Kennan, the Kremlin used Marxism as "the fig-leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability" to justify military growth, oppression at home and expansion abroad. The telegram, while perceptive, offered one choice to the United States as far as its policy with the Soviet Union was concerned: "containment." It also made the fear of communism grow in the American consciousness. Like all fears, this particular one was there up for grabs to be exploited by any charlatan. The first to steal the scene was Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. While talking to a gathering of Republican women in Wheeling, he waved papers which he claimed where evidence of a wide-spread conspiracy. The papers, he claimed, contained a list of 205 names that were known to be members of the communist party and were shaping American policy. A liar, an alcoholic, a corrupt politician, his accusations came at the right time nevertheless. The dénouement of McCarthy's charges is well known. For about three years, McCarthy headed the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). HUAC was a witch-hunt; it modus operandi the same which the inquisition used to paralyze the intellectual life of Europe. Intellectuals from universities, Hollywood actors, directors and writers and politicians were asked to confess their political allegiances and to snitch on their associates. In 1948, the University of Washington fired three teachers who refused to answer questions by state legislators about their membership in the Communist party. The teachers never found another job. Later that same year, the American Federation of Teachers voted against allowing communists to teach. The Board of Regents of the University of California system required its faculty to take a non-Communist oath. Those who refused, after a long battle, were fired. The system ultimately got rid of 31 professors. By the end of the scare, the head-count in the academic world alone added up to 600 professors loosing their jobs.

The 600 were not only political science, history or humanities professors. HUAC and its subsidiaries were thorough; they left no stone unturned. So the roster included physicists, biologists, etc. The most famous confrontation from the scientific world was Oppenheimer. Despite the fact that he had proven pivotal to the success of the Manhattan project, in the 1950's he faced HUAC and lost his security clearance. Oppenheimer's was a high profile case. The Manhattan project had turned him into a public figure. He was articulate, better read than most of his fellow scientists and outspoken. Bohm's on the other hand was a low profile case. Nevertheless, like many other intellectuals, he was asked to implicate his colleagues as members of the Communist party. He refused and in 1951 Princeton University, the same place where Einstein worked, one of the chief educational institutions in the world, fired him. He was paid the last year of his contract on condition that he would not enter the campus.

This intersection of historical circumstance with intellectual pursuits would be trivial if it did not have long term and wide repercussions. Furthermore, the repercussions are not merely personal (Bohm left the United States, taught first at Sao Pablo, then at Israel and eventually settled in England) but actually resonate in the world of ideas. Bohm's victimization went beyond the committee and exile. In fact the harshest reality of it has been the long-term neglect of his ideas in the scientific community. So his case is in too many tragic ways archetypal of the way in which the scientific community works.

Why the neglect one would ask, considering that whatever political allegiances Bohm had can hardly affect the mathematics which buttress his theory? Like Super string theory or Super symmetry now, Bohm's hidden variables had not being experimentally tested then. It was, as physicists call such untested theories, a research in progress (RIP). However, unlike Super string and Super symmetry, Bohm's hidden variables have had neither the amount of devotees nor have they been lavished with research money. Many would argue that the reason for this neglect must be due to Bohm's untenable propositions. In other words, they insist that the neglect be not tinged with ideological concerns. The argument, however, would be an idealist, naïve view of the way in which the scientific community works. Those who would propose it might still cherish the myth of the scientist as a lone thinker in his ivory tower, living above political ideology or economic need, unaffected by the zeitgeist. Like all myths, the ivory tower's is detrimental in the long run. It distorts the reality and like all distortions impedes any sort of analytical or critical thinking.

The fact is that, contrary to popular believe, science is not any more rarefied than any other field and physicists, like political scientists or historians, are willingly or not either voicing or being influenced by institutional, political and ideological dogmas. In Chapter two, we discussed how many biologists, in their attempt to foster the scientific skepticism that allows for objectivity, have also embraced the sort of modern and post-modern nihilism that rejects all teleology. The world of physics is not any less influenced by similar ideologies.

On top of these ideologies, physicists have to deal with the internecine politics of their institution. Theory and experiment, publication and teaching positions do not occur in a vacuum but rather obey the pressures of the academic and institutional market. As physicist Michael Hawkins has argued for scientists it takes "almost suicidal courage to leave the herd and challenge the authority of the astrophysical establishment." If a paper is submitted to a journal for publication and it fails to toe the ideological line, fails to accept the current fashions as far as research and interpretation are concern, then, the authors are "sidelined by the astronomical community of their peers." Like in many institutions, the "sidelining," this pulling of ranks is an economic necessity: the "ideological fundamentalism" of most scientists, Hawkins argues, is a way to project internal stability for the outside world where grant and research money is to be found.

Hawkings' book is part theory and part exposé and when it came out reviewers everywhere remarked, not on the need for such a critique of the establishment, but on the bitterness with which Hawkins dealt with the community. The reviews were unfortunate since they did not pay attention to Hawkins' criticisms. In fact, most reviewers, reverted to the thwarted logic of blaming Hawkins' past, psychological make-up, etc. to explain the reasons for the book, as if Hawkings had had the audacity to point a finger at some completely innocent stranger. His critique, however, sheds light to a lot of things. His chief argument is that there should not be a group of mandarins dictating what scientific evidence means. As he argues "almost all evidence is open to a number of interpretations." Furthermore, to Hawkins the current interpretations of evidence are not necessarily ethereal insights, but fallible ideas imbued by "historical context." Hawkins' Cri-de-Coeur then, involves a healthy skepticism that, if adopted, would open a dialogue not merely between the different branches of science, but between the sciences and humanities. It would, in short, put the scientific work in some sort of context, not merely in the sense of providing viable interpretations of experiments. In the long run, seeing science not as a discipline that takes place at such rarefied levels but as a discipline subject to ideologies, fashions, etc., would at least give science a historical consciousness, a consciousness that would provide scientists with check and balance system.

As we have seen Bohm has suffered on two fronts. The ambition of the pilot wave theory is to cast the weird behavior of quantum within a meaningful framework. In a climate in which any attempt to interpret data in any meaningful context is anathema, scientists have leveled every possible injunction against the pilot wave: Some have argued it untenable because its disregard for Einstein's restriction of action at a distance. Others, more imbued in the ideologies of the time, have wielded that stick which will curse any idea now a days, calling the theory deterministic. The latter accusation is often argued not by a close analysis of Bohm's ideas but merely by resorting to Bohm's politics. In other words, in the most repulsive of gestures, Bohm's critics go back to his encounter with HUAC and his alleged politics. The logic is, of course, wrong headed but it runs as follows: Since Bohm was allegedly a Marxist and Marxism espouses a deterministic and teleological version of history, it follows that Bohm's scientific work was tinged with such ideology. In short, the same scientists who argue that scientific enterprises occur outside any historical context, use the historical circumstances which surrounded Bohm's work to argue his work as invalid, to argue, moreover, the work as infected, so to speak, with ideology.

If an alleged Marxist ideology has made Bohm into a lesser scientist in the eyes of the scientific community, if he has suffered neglect because of the dogmas which many scientists harbor, then the case of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin should come as not surprise. For while Bohm leaned towards an ideology which is materialistic and atheistic at the very core, Teilhard de Chardin, while not embracing any ideology, was still shaped by two impulses which unfortunately are both perceived as detrimental to the scientific endeavor. In an age of specialization, where the Cartesian logic of fragmentation and analysis has lead particle physicists to spend more and more time splitting atoms which they can't put together again; when biologists would much rather focus on tiny phenomena; and where the proverbial split between the sciences and the humanities seems to have become an insurmountable canyon, Teilhard de Chardin is definitely out of place. His goal was first and foremost a synthetic one and the synthesis he attempted was fourfold. Like many of the scientists who we've seen struggling as they try to unify the different theories into one, De Chardin attempted to bring, cosmology, particle physics together. Unlike those same scientists, which we have seen getting lost in the arcane of mathematical jargon, the simplicity of his solution is astonishingly insightful and involves a second synthesis. Teilhard de Chardin espoused not merely the unification of cosmology and particle physics, but did so by providing a common-sense link to the logic of such unification. Namely, he suggested that the copula that linked these two branches of physics was to be found, not in some obscure mathematical system or in that Cartesian insistence to break down nature into smaller components yet, but in evolution. We will look at this solution in close detail in this and the following chapters. For the time being, at the risk of being simplistic, suffice it to say that, Teilhard de Chardin saw, evolution as the manifestation of another force, a force like electromagnetism or gravity but stronger yet and whose modus operandi determined the behavior of other forces.

De Chardin's ambitions did not stop there. His was not the post-Enlightenment mind dwelling on taxonomy and rutted to a single discipline. Like the Enlightenment's predecessors, which the Renaissance more aptly called natural philosophers, men like Leibniz who found no problem negotiating between the world of theology and philosophy and the world of serious science, De Chardin opposed the literalness of scientific materialism and attempted a further synthesis. Again, like Leibniz before him, De Chardin dealt with the hard cold facts of science in a modern fashion and like Leibnitz, understood their irrelevance and limitation if these were seen outside a metaphysical and theological context. To scientists, of course, this latter attempt is, despite their alleged lack of dogma, pure blasphemy.

So, again, the fate of Teilhard de Chardin's work should cause no surprise. The neglect he has suffered makes Bohm's neglect seem benign. To ad insult to injury, however, since De Chardin moved in two worlds, the scientific and the religious, his work was also banned by the church authorities. Teilhard de Chardin was born in 1881 in the Auvergne region which Canteloube has immortalized in his extensive collection Songs of Auvergne. His birth date places him within one of the most remarkable generations, a generation that revolutionized science and art and which includes Proust (1871) and Joyce (1882), Rilke (1875) and T.S. Eliot (1888), Schoenberg (1874) and Stravisnky (1882), Einstein (1879) and Bohr (1885). Teilhard de Chardin's father was an amateur naturalist and collected stones insects and plants. As such, he encouraged Teilhard de Chardin's penchant for the natural sciences. Eleven years old he enrolled in a Jesuit college and by 1899 he entered seminary to study for the priesthood. The modern sensibility has made much out of priests. Through the media the priest has become the emblem of an outdated mode of life: provincial in outlook, closed minded and oblivious to modern advance. While the church as an institution has done plenty to further such point of view, the truth has always been quite different. Like all stereotypes, the latter only emphasizes one aspect of an institution that has produced more than pious and astringent men. In fact, as one reads the outline of Teilhard de Chardin's biography, one should remember that his order, founded during the counter-reformation, has always focused on knowledge and education. Originally established to undertake the "re-conversion" of those hesitant souls who had changed denominations as well as to prevent any desertion of young, stubborn souls, conceived of education as the very tool to contain the problems the reformation was causing.

For most readers, the latter information might be arcane. Nowadays, we attend different institutions with a similar history. People graduate from Oxford or Princeton or La Sorbonne. All these institutions had, like the Jesuits, an original goal, and have had, like the Jesuits, a remarkable roster of alumni. Nevertheless, these famous universities, while they cling to their past for commercial purposes and though they maintain some of the most remarkable faculty, use their history as a tourist trap more than a didactic model. Consequently, Oxford, Princeton, Le Sorbonne are not even distant mirrors of their originals. The Jesuit order at the beginning of the century is quite other thing, clinging as it was, and as it has struggled throughout the century, to its original charter and, more importantly, its original didactic methods.

So it is here, at the seminary that we can assume that Teilhard de Chardin would inherit one cognitive tool that, transformed, would inform much of his latter scientific work. As we argued before, dealing with the particular didactic problems brought about by the Reformation, the Jesuit order developed what we know now as casuistry. "Casuistry" and "Jesuitical" have become in our day synonyms for deviousness. However, the original casuists, men like Mariana and Jeremy Taylor, were men of high intellectual caliber. Casuistry is the theory of cases: the casuists show how to apply the general rules that govern conduct to the particular moral problem. In other words, by inventing casuistry Jesuits gave the modern world a general way in which to deal with particular cases. The method is still with us in law and medicine. When a judge decides a case, he is using casuistry. All the codes of conduct in the different professions, medicine, the military, law use casuistry. More importantly casuistry requires an epistemological and logical step that had not been codified before the Jesuits, it requires the mind to abstract, to generalize, from a particular pool of cases. So the Jesuit inheritance goes beyond conduct and impinges upon any of the disciplines that require logic.

In many ways one can see Teilhard de Chardin's work as completely informed by this intellectual impulse. Most scientists avoid generalities and abstractions and only focus on particular cases to derive general principles after thorough experiment. Teilhard de Chardin's work took those general principles which scientists had derived and understood that to unify them, it was not necessary to backtrack and revisit the minutiae of yet more particulars. In fact Teilhard de Chardin saw that what science needed was only to find a general rubric under which the behavior of the particulars would make sense. To many this might seem unscientific. It is not really. The big instances of such work are well known. Einstein did not need to go back and rediscover Newtonian physics in order to come up with relativity. Similarly, though the general public believes that the principles of science are only drawn in the laboratory, after hours of interminable research, the truth is that in physics, for the last 100 years at least theory has preceded experiment. Even in evolutionary biology one finds this sort of casuistry in certain work. In fact, contrary to popular believe, evolutionary biology has not progressed this century through the polemic work of writers like Gould and Hawkins, who love to dwell on the differences and the particular and who are complete literal when it comes to the reading of Darwin. No, the most interesting work, work that we will encounter later has been undertaken by people who resort to generalities.

In fact, if De Chardin's work as a biologist and paleontologist anticipates anything in evolutionary biology, it is what has come to be known as cladistics. Cladistics solves a central problem not merely for the evolutionary biologist but also provides a model for other scientists. Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists are faced with the crucial problem of never being able to reconstruct the geological or evolutionary past in its entirety because there are not enough particulars to develop into a coherent theory. The cladistic solution involves turning speculation about evolutionary history away from arguments about actual descent to theories about relationships. Unlike the evolutionary trees which Gould condemns and which for all practical purpose are modeled after our genealogical charts, cladograms assume that if evolution happened, then evolutionary changes - whether they affect limbs or genes - will be handed down to future species which shared a common ancestor. These derived features are the bases of cladistics. Instead of trying to reconstruct trees of descent to their most particular minutiae, the cladogram maps out the relationships between species as a series of regularly splitting branches based on the characteristics of the actual living animal. Cladistics, then, is deductive rather than inductive. Teilhard de Chardin's work seems in many way to pioneer the technique. In fact we will see something very similar to what is now known as cladistics when we get to The Human Phenomenon and see how the book itself is structured to emphasize, not detailed chronologies and direct descent, which is impossible, but family relationships.

That Teilhard de Chardin anticipated cladistics should not be seen merely as an abstracting tendency he inherited from his Jesuit education. For while Jesuit casuistry must have had a central role in his intellectual development, science, hard science with observation and field work, were also central in De Chardin's life. After 1911, when he was ordained as a priest, after living in Cairo and Hastings, De Chardin dedicated the bulk of 44 years to scientific research. He worked first in the Museé National d'Historie Naturelle. There, under the tutelage of Marcellin Boule, a specialist on the Neanderthal man, he got his first lessons on human paleontology. He was not merely a curator, but did actual fieldwork and took part of the excavations in caves in North-West Spain.

Teilhard de Chardin's critics, who abound and who have accused him of every possible blasphemy against science, have also seen his work as "poetic" and argued that its theological bent as a-historical in both the evolutionary level and at the human level. Yet if anything informed Teilhard de Chardin's thought, it was history. His life, like the life of many of those who belonged to his generation was intersected by the two central catastrophes of the 20th century: the two world wars. Far from being a spectator to either event, Teilhard de Chardin was an actual participant at least in WWI. In fact, if anything would interrupt his scientific research, it was his work as a stretcher bearer in WWI. Our principal military historian, John Keegan, has called WWI "a tragic and unnecessary conflict," which "ended the lives of ten million people, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent, a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of WWII can stand without reference to those roots." Teilhard de Chardin was a first hand witness of this tragedy. And it was this tragedy that catalyzed his ultimate vision, a vision which required a "cosmic life" (as he entitled his first essay) in order to redeem the brutality of fact.

So Teilhard de Chardin's ideas are really, among other things, attempts to cast the scientific milieu in a social context. Later, as he saw WWII begin and envisioned the whole nightmare again, De Chardin, with his views now firmly grounded would write a moving essay trying to interpret the war. "The Moment of Choice" as the essay is entitled, is striking, not because of its optimism (another reason De Chardin critics have dismissed his work) but because its interpretations of the conflict. Teilhard de Chardin saw WWII as the conflict between "internationalism," between a cosmopolitan culture and nationalism, the "reactionary fragmentation of ethnic groups in the name of history" (15).

In Teilhard de Chardin's thought, WWI and WWII pushed the need for a science which would have some social context and a vision that would rid evolution of its dire and rather pessimistic vision, a vision which instead of seeing "mankind" on "the lines of a stem that is swollen with the sap of the stems it killed as it grew" would see it instead as an "organism obeying" the "universe's most unmistakable laws:" "no longer a succession of eliminations, but a confluence of energies." Such vision would remain poetic without fieldwork and scientific backing. However, Teilhard de Chardin undertook yet more serious scientific work after WWI. In the years following, he would study at Le Sorbonne, write a thesis on "Eocene Mammals and their Deposits," teach and work in China. It was with his first attempt to synthesize theology and science that he started feeling the pressure from church officials. After publishing a paper on "Original Sin" Teilhard de Chardin lost his professorship and was exiled to China.

The paper, like so much of Teilhard de Chardin would remain unpublished until his death but it is important in that the reader can get a clear view of Teilhard de Chardin's interpretation of the scriptures. Teilhard de Chardin was not a literalist. Unlike so many believers who today go by the name of creationists, unable to reconcile scientific fact with religious believe, Teilhard de Chardin knew scientific fact as fact and saw, in the scriptures a flesh and blood depiction of fact which through drama and language attained archetypal weight and echoed larger phenomena. So for Teilhard de Chardin, that paramount of Christian theology, the fall from Eden, is not a literal event, but a figure that represents the need for redemption. Ultimately Teilhard de Chardin sees original sin as symbolic of "setbacks" in the history of humanity. And since he envisions the history of humanity as subject to the same "laws," as following the same dynamics as the history of the universe, then he sees the fall as emblematic of the many "crises" which any process encounters. The essay is seminal in understanding Teilhard de Chardin. It not only clarifies the ways in which he will interpret science and scripture, but it also establishes three very important themes.

First the historicity of life. For Teilhard de Chardin we occur in time and time has to be taken in its widest inception, as cosmic, geological time or as he called it in an essay entitled "The Mysticism of Science" "organic" time. In short, if one wants to understand Teilhard de Chardin, one has to think of "unbounded time," a chronology which encompasses the whole of cosmic history. Second, the essay establishes that time, other than being a fluent arrow, is more like a thought process, in other words, an initial proposition that takes various steps and which at each step is informed by entire indexes and bibliographies from which the thought does not only borrow but also from which it branches. As each branch appears, the idea might stagnate or shoot in different directions. In fact, if we are to find a similar conception of time in our century, it would be necessary to resort to literature and not to the Proustian vision where sensual memory and art recapture the lost moments, but to the Borgesian library, that emblem of the universe where man - near extinction - is not the center, but rather an accessory of the library and the library survives despite extinctions: "iluminada, solitaria, infinita, perfectamente inmovil, armada de volumenes preciosos, inútil, incorruptible, secreta."

Finally by seeing time as an entity that contains all of cosmic history and that progresses in a fractal manner so to speak and not in a purely linear one "Notes on Some Possible Representations of original Sin" is able to establish crises as the cruxes of evolution. For Teilhard de Chardin, the Fall is "an event" which" "cannot be verified or checked." And like all events which determine the outcome of an evolutionary trek, the one that the Fall symbolizes is cloaked in a Teilhardian paradox: it is "too small and distant to be directly observed" and it cannot be distinguished because "it is too big" as far as its consequences are concerned. So like the lines of descent which we cannot fully trace, the crises which original sin symbolizes, was, in Teilhard de Chardin view, a minute change, akin to a genetic mutation, but had, despite its minuteness, unfathomable consequences.

While these three points are crucial to understand Teilhard de Chardin, the essay in itself is still aligned to Christian theology more than the work which he would write later. He was still, we can imagine, trying to work with theologians and the church and had not made his move to purely scientific work. This move was done during his exile in China. He would remain in China for the bulk of 20 years and would perform geological and paleontological work. Most importantly, Teilhard de Chardin would write his two most important works, The Divine Milieu and The Human Phenomenon. The two works are vast and, if the following is not a contradiction, elliptical and encyclopedic at once. We will dedicate the entire next chapter to The Human Phenomenon for the time being, suffice it to say that the book in its large vista and complexity has no modern precedent and if one were to look for similar works in the past then one would find that ideal, M. Burton envisioned, a book that would branch out from a single cell and contain all the past knowledge of a subject. Burton's book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the Renaissance encyclopedia on the subject, is still limited by the topic. So really to find a similar impulse behind a book, an impulse to integrate scientific knowledge with history, philosophy and religion one would have to go back to Pascal's Penseés. Like the Penseés, The Human Phenomenon is elusive and difficult. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal had to resort to ellipses and was even more fragmented than De Chardin at the end, to the extent that the Penseés are completely aphoristic.

A better place to start exploring Teilhard de Chardin might be the smaller essay "What I Believe" however. But before we embark on a close reading of the essay, we should conclude our outline of Teilhard de Chardin's life and see what the fate of his work has been after his death. After his protracted stay in China, Teilhard de Chardin returned to France in 1946. For the following years, he was involved in both theoretical research - he worked in anthropogenesis - and more public concerns, including conferences on Evolution. Throughout these years, Teilhard de Chardin insisted that scientific research was in many ways saturated. He saw no need for new facts. Rather, what he espoused was the need for a new perspective, a new model, a "new way of seeing facts" so that they be cast in a cosmological framework.

Teilhard de Chardin's last years were spent in the United States. There, a man in his seventies, he projected the same curiosity that lead him through life. Furthermore, even in the slight observations which we have from his stay in the US, one can still see the sort of mind which is not satisfied with merely reportage but always seeks to interpret and synthesize. In a minor but charming essay, we can see him in awe of the early particle accelerators. In an almost confessional turn he tells us: "Last summer we were admitted as visitors to the cyclotrons of the University of California." His observations of "these strange machines" are telling, not merely because they have the wide-eyed wonder that we find in the observations of most of the great scientific mind, but because they manage to subsume an otherwise "primitive' devise by today's standard, within his system of thought. For Teilhard de Chardin the cyclotron is not merely another machine, but a machine which can be seen within the continuum of machines which have allowed for the expansion of our self-awareness and of consciousness in general. He saw in the cyclotron, as he saw in "electronic microscopes and gigantic telescopes," "computers," etc., "the same chain process" that "can be clearly recognized beneath the extreme diversity of forms and procedures: a process of concentration and synthesis,..." Again, the essay on the cyclotron is neither seminal nor central in Teilhard de Chardin's canon; nevertheless, its confessional tone and its rhapsodic structure reveal two crucial elements, the persistent attempt to place minute details in a larger context and a keen interpretative mind. And these two elements always informed Teilhard de Chardin's attempt to uncover that underlying process that informed and transformed all. Teilhard de Chardin died shortly after seeing the cyclotrons, three years spent in New York to be exact.

Ironically, however, what Teilhard de Chardin saw in the cyclotron as possibility and actuality has not come to pass. As we have previously argued, the cyclotron's offspring, the great particle accelerators at Chicago and Geneva have become breeding grounds for specialized arcane. So if the cyclotron for Teilhard de Chardin could be turn into emblem, then we should keep in the spirit of it and use it to as emblem of what has happened to Teilhard de Chardin's life work and vision. Banned and silenced during his life, Teilhard de Chardin's work has had many followers. The letters, essays and the two central books of his oeuvre have been published and translated and while none of the translations into English are satisfactory, the books have stayed in print through several editions.

Unfortunately, the readership has been less than generous. Whether from the theological camp or from the scientific one Teilhard de Chardin has not fared well. Theologians find him to optimistic, not attuned enough to the so called implications of the philosophical movements of the latter part of the century. And in truth, nothing could be further from existentialism and post modernism than Teilhard de Chardin. Scientists, on the other hand, have, as we have stated before, accused Teilhard de Chardin of every possible blasphemy within the scientific establishment. The kindest of them, people like Timothy Ferris, will accept the exceptionality of his mind but use him as a cautionary tale against any sort of determinist thought. Scientists that have been influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, whether due institutional pressure or to their own muted fears often dismiss him. Frank Tippler, even though he appropriates some important ideas for his work in The Physics of Immortality gives Teilhard de Chardin the brush off, reducing him to "nice poetry" and ultimately, while admitting that the concept of the Omega point is Teilhardian through and through, he accuses Teilhard de Chardin of being a vitalist. Finally, the most aggressive blow perhaps has come from evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson and Sir Peter Medwar, who have argued that The Human Phenomenon "cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense...the greatest part of it is nonsense, tricked out by a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be accused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others, he had taken great pains to deceive himself." Both Simpson and Medwar wrote this after they allegedly tried to take The Human Phenomenon into science. Their reading need not delay us here. Instead, in the following chapter we will provide an overview of The Human Phenomenon and through the rest of the book, will analyze how the book pairs up with recent scientific findings.