Memo to Physicist Kip Thorne: Review Your Einstein and Emerson

Kip Thorne and other scientists are attempting to prove things about the unseen that have been sensed by great thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Crunch Time,” by Preston Lerner, Aug. 11).

I would like to quote what Emerson sensed about invisible phenomena: “It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy ... by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe.”

It will be interesting to learn if the gravitational project is successful, but it is far more rewarding to sense what Emerson knew intuitively. His understanding of ourselves as inseparable from the universe is happiness itself; and like this universe, it might be beyond our ability to prove. Seeking knowledge without intuitive understanding is a little like eating an orange peel and throwing away the fruit.

Robert H. Williams

Monterey Park