Time for New Theories

There are a few spots in my vineyards where I always pause.

I cannot tell you exactly why. Nothing looks unusual. The vines are the same variety, the soil appears the same. And yet, standing there feels different from standing twenty meters away. Better, somehow. More settled.

I have mentioned this to an old farmer friend, half-expecting to receive a perplexed and polite smile. Instead, he nodded. He has his own spots.

This small, unscientific observation has stayed with me — and lately, it has begun to feel like part of a much larger question.

I studied mathematics and physics at university, and although I left academia many years ago, I still follow new research with genuine interest. Turning to biodynamic farming eight years ago, I slowly came to accept that there are aspects of nature our current scientific models struggle to explain. Not because science has failed. But because some phenomena do not seem to belong entirely to the world of hard measurements and objective quantities. They are somehow experiential — sensed rather than simply measured.

To understand why this matters, it helps to go back a little.

In the 17th century, René Descartes helped create one of the great turning points in Western thought. He separated subject from object, mind from matter, observer from observed. Science increasingly became the study of only that which could be objectively measured — and this was extraordinarily successful. It unlocked physics, chemistry, engineering, and the modern technological age.

But there was a hidden cost: reality became reduced to the fully physical and the objectively observable. What could not be measured was quietly set aside.

Every age believes it has finally understood the world. And every age eventually discovers that it has not.

The Newtonians believed the cosmos was mechanistic and complete — until Einstein and quantum physics arrived and rewrote the rules of space, time, and matter entirely. And once again, we thought we understood reality.

But now the edges are beginning to fray.

Interestingly, the most fascinating open questions all seem to point toward the same gap: the exclusion of subjective experience from our model of reality.

Consider consciousness — perhaps the deepest unsolved mystery in science today. Compare a human brain with an AI running on a computer. Each can write poetry or discuss philosophy. Each obeys the laws of physics. But inside the computer there are only processes and signals. Inside the human being, there is also a felt inner experience. How does that arise? Why is there an inner world at all?

Thinkers such as David Chalmers, Christof Koch, Roger Penrose, and Robin Carhart-Harris have spent careers on this question without resolution. Or take chi in Chinese medicine, prana in Ayurvedic tradition — phenomena for which we have no generally accepted scientific framework, largely because we lack instruments capable of measuring them objectively. And yet anyone who has seriously engaged with these practices often experiences something directly within their own body.

It feels as though we may be approaching another "Einstein moment" — a point where a fundamentally new theory emerges, one capable of explaining not only the measurable world, but also these dimensions of experience that do not fit comfortably within our current models.

Which brings me back to the vineyard.

And to a dinner I shared recently with two friends who are highly experienced professional wine tasters. I asked them whether they believed they could identify a biodynamic wine blind.

They thought they could.

Not because the wines necessarily tasted different. But because the energy of the wines felt different.

Their words, not mine.

I have been sitting with that ever since. I think about the spots in my vineyards where I always pause. I think about the farmers who nod when I describe it. I think about whether the wines that come from the places on my land where I feel most at ease carry something of that ease into the glass.

Perhaps taste is not even the right word for what we are sensing.

Perhaps there is something else entirely — and we simply do not yet have the theory to name it.