Dr. John J. Petrovic
"The notion that Science and Spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both." - Carl Sagan
You may be asking yourself how can there be any Science in Spirituality. These two areas are considered by many people today to be fundamentally opposed to each other. After all, doesn't Science deal with the material world while Spirituality deals with the non-material, and never the two shall meet.
Yet the fact of the matter is that the primary goal of Science is to understand and describe reality. And the reality is that the root fundamentals of Science converge with the metaphysical. In addition, there are a great many "inconvenient truths", observational facts that cannot be explained using our current scientific paradigms. For Science to progress, it must come to grips with issues that seem to reside in the Spirituality of the non-physical.
One should not confuse Spirituality with Religion. Spirituality encompasses the nature of the non-physical, while Religion involves belief systems. The two are not the same.
What is physical and what is non-physical? The distinction depends upon our ability to detect.
The physical is what we can presently detect with our senses or the scientific extensions of our senses. However, we may or may not have existing scientific paradigms to explain what we detect. An example of detection without scientific explanation is nonlocality (entanglement) in quantum physics. Extrasensory perceptions such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis are another example of physical effects that have been shown to exist but which cannot presently be explained.
The non-physical is what we cannot presently detect with our senses or scientific extensions of our senses. The non-physical is often referred to as the spiritual. The qualia of our inner consciousness currently falls into the non-physical category. So does the singularity at the center of a cosmic black hole. The existence of higher dimensions is also non-physical in character.
There are some borderline physical/non-physical phenomena. Two of these are Dark Matter and Dark Energy. We can detect gravitational effects that cosmological theories ascribe to the presence of these quantities, but we currently have no direct detection of the quantities themselves.
The non-physical can be changed into the physical as we improve our detection abilities. For example, before the theoretical work of Maxwell and the experimental work of Hertz, electromagnetic waves were in the non-physical category. And before its discovery by Becquerel, radioactivity was something considered non-physical.
As a scientist, I am compelled to search for reality in whatever direction that search may take me. The content of this website is what I have discovered thus far.
Feel free to explore my books and let both your logic and your intuition guide you to the truth of existence. You can read them for free on this website. Should you desire a Kindle or paperback copy of any of my books, they are available for purchase at Amazon.
About the Author:
Dr. John Joseph Petrovic is a scientist who retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Laboratory Fellow in 2005 after thirty-three years of scientific research in many areas of materials science. He has published two hundred scientific papers and holds ten U.S. patents.
Since his retirement, he has been actively seeking to understand the nature of reality and spirituality, by combining his scientific perspective with his personal intuition. To date, he has published six books on these topics:
"The First Principles: A Scientist's Guide to the Spiritual" ( c. 2008, John Joseph Petrovic)
"Exploring Death: What You Should Know About Dying" (c. 2010, John Joseph Petrovic)
"Dreams of Reality" (c. 2012, John Joseph Petrovic)
"The God Within" (c. 2016, John Joseph Petrovic)
"Physics of the Non-Physical" (c. 2018, John Joseph Petrovic)
"What ET Believes" (c. 2022, John Joseph Petrovic)
"Fields of Consciousness" (c. 2024, John Joseph Petrovic)
If you would like to contact me directly, please do not hesitate to do so at my email address:
johnjpetrovic@gmail.com .