Interesting spirituality of some in Academic/Scientific Mainstream

Wasn't sure what to title this thread or if it will even be of its implied 'broader' interest, but here goes...

Came across a YouTube video (linked below) which is a snippet of a longer conversation between Lex Fridman (an emerging favorite of mine; really like this guy and his approach) and Edward Frenkel (rather famous mathematician apparently; not someone I was familiar with before).  Anyway, the title caught my eye: "Death is not the end".  I thought it would be worth a click as the interviewee (Frenkel) I assumed would be of the more scientific materialist/reductionist worldview.  Both the video and a bit of browsing has convinced me otherwise.

So, I have a two part motivation in sharing:  First (and foremost), I found the video really inspiring especially Frenkel's comments from the 9:20 mark forward (but I'd recommend listening to the entire video from the start; its only 12 and half minutes long).  Secondly though, I thought it might be interesting to see if any of you have found similarly inspiring comments/narratives on spirituality from well respected members of the academic/scientific mainstream.



Lastly, came across this comment attributed to Jung in one of Frenkel's published articles that I thought was really interesting too:

...just as mathematicians need to acknowledge, embrace, and utilize their capacity for imagination in order to be successful, so do all humans.  Carl Jung warned us that the widening rift between imagination and knowledge (or rather, "what we think we know") is a symptom of "the split consciousness so characteristic of the mental disorders of our day."

From this article: https://www.edwardfrenkel.com/einstein-summary.pdf

He seems to be anything but a reductionist.  That's inspiring in and of itself to me.

Wasn't sure what to title this thread or if it will even be of its implied 'broader' interest, but here goes...

Came across a YouTube video (linked below) which is a snippet of a longer conversation between Lex Fridman (an emerging favorite of mine; really like this guy and his approach) and Edward Frenkel (rather famous mathematician apparently; not someone I was familiar with before).  Anyway, the title caught my eye: "Death is not the end".  I thought it would be worth a click as the interviewee (Frenkel) I assumed would be of the more scientific materialist/reductionist worldview.  Both the video and a bit of browsing has convinced me otherwise.

So, I have a two part motivation in sharing:  First (and foremost), I found the video really inspiring especially Frenkel's comments from the 9:20 mark forward (but I'd recommend listening to the entire video from the start; its only 12 and half minutes long).  Secondly though, I thought it might be interesting to see if any of you have found similarly inspiring comments/narratives on spirituality from well respected members of the academic/scientific mainstream.



Lastly, came across this comment attributed to Jung in one of Frenkel's published articles that I thought was really interesting too:


From this article: https://www.edwardfrenkel.com/einstein-summary.pdf

He seems to be anything but a reductionist.  That's inspiring in and of itself to me.

Thanks for the link. I didn’t hear Frenkel at any point suggesting survival of consciousness. But maybe that’s not what you mean by sprituality in this context?

Thanks for the link. I didn’t hear Frenkel at any point suggesting survival of consciousness. But maybe that’s not what you mean by sprituality in this context?

He didn't explicitly but I interpreted him to allude to there being something "more".  That, combined with his testimony regarding love, seems not very scientific reductionist to me at all and rather quite spiritual.  What I took from it anyway.