Dressed warmly, his radio turned low, Astronomer Gustaf Strömberg of the Mount Wilson Observatory spends night after night looking up at a great curved slit of the heavens. Born at Gothenburg, Sweden 57 years ago, a student of physics, mathematics and celestial mechanics, listed and starred (voted outstanding by his scientific colleagues) in American Men of Science for distinguished research in stellar motions, statistics and luminosities, Gustaf Strömberg is nevertheless not the kind of scientist to pore myopically over tables and spectrum slides while taking the stars for granted. During the long nights on the mountain overshadowing Pasadena, he has done a lot of unorthodox thinking about the human mind, the human soul, the World Soul, Cosmic Consciousness, Cosmos, God. Now he has published the result of his pondering in a book, The Soul of the Universe* a calm treatise calculated to make the flesh of hardheaded materialists crawl. He starts with straightforward scientific exposition, but soon plunges into intuitive extensions; then into metaphysics, mysticism, finally into unabashed theism.
Overt purpose of the book is to examine the findings of modern science for light on the domain commonly accepted as beyond science. Quantum Mechanics (mathematics of the atom) finds that a subatomic particle, e. g., an electron, is accompanied by immaterial waves of energy which seem to guide it. Indeed it is only by analysis of its "pilot wave" that the speed and position of an electron can be determined, and then only probably, not certainly. Immaterial waves need not be tangled up with matter at all. Like radio waves, they can exist in or travel through nothingness.
Take something immensely more complex than an electron: a living cell. When the cell is "ready" to divide, the centrosome separates and moves to opposite sides, the chromosomes line up in the middle and then split evenly; then some thing nips in the sides of the cell to a wasp-waisted constriction, and finally the cell divides into two healthy duplicates of its original self. Biologists have the devil's own time trying to explain this mysterious, well-drilled maneuver. In Strömberg's view, it is initiated and controlled by an "immaterial wave of organization." Though immaterial, the guiding wave has a structure in spacetime. Strömberg calls it a "genie" (plural, "genii").
A developing embryo, far more complex than a single cell, has a commanding genie and subordinate genii for each organ, each cell. So has an adult organism. Even colonies of individuals may have a commanding genie, as when the marine animals called Portuguese Men-of-War gather in a cluster which behaves like a single animal, with groups of individuals told off to perform various organic functions. Finally, the whole universe, which is in constant evolution, must have a supreme genie—the Cosmos or World Soul.