The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics
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15
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Average rating4
A "fascinating [and] provocative" argument by a particle physicist—marshalling a "heady mix of history, philosophy and cutting-edge theory" (Wall Street Journal)—for monism, the ancient idea about the universe that says, All is One In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Päs presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole. The idea, called monism, has a rich three-thousand-year history: Plato believed that “all is one” before monism was rejected as irrational and suppressed as a heresy by the medieval Church. Nevertheless, monism persisted, inspiring Enlightenment science and Romantic poetry. Päs aims to show how monism could inspire physics today, how it could slice through the intellectual stagnation that has bogged down progress in modern physics and help the field achieve the grand theory of everything it has been chasing for decades. Blending physics, philosophy, and the history of ideas, The One is an epic, mind-expanding journey through millennia of human thought and into the nature of reality itself.
Reviews with the most likes.
In The One, Heinrich Pas presents an impressive argument for a new [physics] perspective of reality. I seriously enjoyed challenging my brain to understand the various concepts and postulations expressed throughout this book — the explanation as to why we have been so focused on our current perspective of physics since Bohr and beyond, the deep dive into the historical context of the central idea, and the presentation of so many ways this theory fits into our current landscape.
My only negative note, which I see as a relatively significant one, is that this book is 100% not for a reader who does not have a background in physics. I have an entire degree in this stuff, and plenty of chunks of the text went right over my head. I wish there was a way to remedy that.
(3.5 stars)
