I’m always interested in the spiritual experiences of thinkers past. Many of the people who founded the very basis of Western society, received their inspiration from supposed, “spiritual beings”. Blaise Pascal provides another example. Pascal is best known for scientific contributions like the principle of hydrostatics, known as Pascal’s Law. In math, Pascal helped develop probability theory and also made a very large contribution to the understanding of infinite series and to the geometry of curves. But later in his life, Pascal had a sudden religious conversion. During the night of the 23rd to 24th of November 1654, he was accompanied by a lighted vision which he interpreted as fire which brought him the total conviction of God’s ‘reality and presence’. After this point, he devoted the rest of his life to understanding religion.

A recent neuroscience paper aims to interpret his religious experience through migraines. Regardless of the source of the experience, Pascal’s case is yet another example of a highly rational and developed scientific thinker having an amazing spiritual experience which changed his life.