The decline of traditional religion in the West has not removed the need for men and women to find a deeper meaning behind existence. Why is the world the way it is and how do we, as conscious individuals, fit into the great scheme? There is a growing feeling that science, especially what is known as the new physics, can provide answers where religion remains vague and faltering. Many people in search of a meaning to their lives are finding enlightenment in the revolutionary developments at the frontiers of science. Much to the bewilderment of professional scientists, quasi-religious cults are being formed around such unlikely topics as quantum physics, space-time relativity, black holes and the big hang. How can physics, with its reputation for cold precision and objective materialism, pro- vide such fertile soil for the mystical? The truth is that the spirit of scientific inquiry has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past 50 years. The twin revolutions of the theory of relativity, with its space-warps and timewarps, and the quantum theory, which reveals the shadowy and unsubstantial nature of atoms, have demolished the classical image of a clockwork universe slavishly unfolding along a predetermined pathway. Replacing this sterile mechanism is a world full of shifting indeterminism and subtle interactions which have no counterpart in daily experience. To study the new physics is to embark on a journey of wonderment and paradox, to glimpse the universe in a novel perspective, in which subject and object, mind and matter, force and field, become intertwined. Even the creation of the universe itself has fallen within the province of scientific inquiry. The new cosmology provides, for the first time, a consistent picture of how all physical structures, including space and time, came to exist out of nothing. We are moving towards an understanding in which matter, force, order and creation are unified into a single descriptive theme. Many of us who work in fundamental physics are deeply impressed by the harmony and order which pervades the physical world. To me the laws of the universe, from quarks to quasars, dovetail together so felicitously that the impression there is something behind it all seems overwhelming. The laws of physics are so remarkably clever they can surely only be a manifestation of genius. Scientists find the new cults bewildering because they are______.