Have you ever thought intensely about an old friend you hadn’t seen in years, only for your phone to ring seconds later with their name on the screen? Or perhaps during a pivotal life crisis, you encountered a specific animal, book, or symbol that offered an uncanny, perfect answer to your inner turmoil?

In the early 1900s, a Viennese biologist named Paul Kammerer carried a notebook in which he recorded coincidences. In a park, he counted the people who passed by with umbrellas and noticed that the same number appeared again and again. He heard a name in the morning and met the person that afternoon. From these notes he wrote a book, The Law of Series , in which he proposed that events fall into clusters through some force unknown to science, as waves gather on a shore. Kammerer was derided, and he killed himself in 1926. Half a century later, a Hungarian-born writer revived his ideas in a book about coincidence, and it became one of the strangest books by one of the twentieth century's most remarkable minds. A Life of Many Lives Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest on September 5, 1905, and grew up in Vienna. He worked as a journalist, joined the Communist Party in 1931, and left it in 1938 in disillusion. In the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by Franco's forces and ...

In 1967, a young biologist at Boston University sent a long paper to a scientific journal and watched it come back, again and again. It was rejected by about fifteen journals before one finally accepted it. The paper, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells," argued something that sounded absurd: that the complex cells of animals, plants and fungi were not born by slow, gradual change, but by a series of partnerships in which one bacterium swallowed another and the two never separated. The biologist was Lynn Margulis. Within a few decades, the main idea of her paper became a textbook fact, and her name became bound to a larger and more controversial vision of life on Earth as a web of alliances. From Rejection to Textbook Lynn Margulis was born in Chicago in 1938 and was married for some years to the astronomer Carl Sagan, for which reason her early paper appeared under the name Lynn Sagan. She spent most of her career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her central pr...

Almost every culture has a story of how the world began. There is the Babylonian tale of the sea goddess torn in two to make heaven and earth, the Genesis account of the seven days, the Hindu hymn that asks whether even the gods know how it all happened. In the last century, science has given us a story of its own. It tells us that about 13.8 billion years ago, space and time began to expand from an extremely hot, dense state. It tells us that the first atoms formed, that stars burned and exploded and made the heavier elements, and that those elements became planets and eventually living things. The question some thinkers have asked is whether this story, which belongs to all of us, can also be a story we live by. A Cosmologist with a Mission Brian Swimme is an American mathematical cosmologist who has spent his career trying to answer that question. He earned his doctorate in gravitational dynamics at the University of Oregon in 1978 and went on to teach at the California Instit...

In February 1943, in the middle of a world war, a physicist stood before a crowded lecture hall at Trinity College, Dublin, and asked an astonishing question: what is life, from the point of view of physics? The speaker was Erwin Schrödinger, who had already won a Nobel Prize for the equation that bears his name. A refugee from Nazi-ruled Europe, he now lived in neutral Ireland. The lectures became a small book, What Is Life? , which inspired a generation of biologists. Its final pages, though, took a turn that surprised many readers: a quiet meditation on the oneness of mind, drawn from the sacred texts of India. A Physicist in Exile Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887. In 1926 he published the wave equation that describes how the quantum state of a system changes in time, one of the foundations of modern physics. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 with Paul Dirac. That same year he left Germany, where he held a post in Berlin, in protest at the Nazi regi...

In 1973, a young writer in Lincoln, Nebraska, who had left the study of biochemistry without finishing a degree, sat down and began a book meant to answer a question that most academic disciplines avoid: how do the psychology of the West, the contemplative traditions of the East, and the old idea of spiritual growth fit together in one picture? The book was The Spectrum of Consciousness , published in 1977 when its author, Ken Wilber, was twenty-eight. It launched a career that has made Wilber the best-known, and one of the most debated, theorists of what is called integral thought. A Self-Taught Synthesizer Wilber was born in Oklahoma City in 1949. Medical studies at Duke University were followed by biochemistry in Nebraska, and Wilber left both, with no doctorate and no teaching post. The books came out of long years of reading, in psychology, mysticism, sociology and philosophy, and they were written with a confidence that thrilled some readers and irritated others. Among the ...

In 1923, a French Jesuit priest found himself in the Ordos Desert in northern China, on a scientific expedition, on the feast of the Transfiguration, without bread or wine for Mass. So Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a Mass in his notebook instead. The opening lines say, in paraphrase, that since he has neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, he will raise himself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real, and offer on the altar of the whole earth the labor and the sorrow of the world. The text, "The Mass on the World," contains in miniature everything he later tried to say: that matter and spirit are not enemies, and that the universe is moving toward a goal. Priest and Fossil Hunter Teilhard was born on May 1, 1881, in the Auvergne, in France, and entered the Jesuit order as a young man. He trained as a geologist and paleontologist, and in the First World War he served as a stretcher-bearer at the front, earning military honors. Later he spent many years ...