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The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics Kindle Edition

by Heinrich Päs (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 198 ratings
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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. 

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  5. Publication date
    January 17, 2023
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  1. The most fundamental description of the universe has to start with the universe itself.
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  2. Quantum weirdness can be boiled down to three concepts utterly alien to our everyday experience: superposition, complementarity, and entanglement.
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  3. Decoherence is the agent protecting our daily-life experience from too much quantum weirdness. And it realizes the rest of Heraclitus’s tenet: “from One all things.”
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From the Publisher

The One

The One

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Are we one with the universe? It is a question as old as mankind, as deep as a wormhole, and as broad as the infinitely branching possibilities of the Many World's Interpretation. But Päs is ready for the challenge and delivers an original and fresh account of both the history and the science of monism. An enticing read for those who seek to understand their place in nature—and who does not?”―Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and author of Existential Physics

“Usually we say the universe is made of particles, but Päs shows how quantum physics inverts that. The whole comes first, not the parts—the parts come from fragmenting the whole. I’ll never see reality the same way again!”―George Musser, author of Spooky Action at a Distance --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Heinrich Päs is a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He has held positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Hawai’i and has conducted research visits at CERN and Fermilab. He lives in Bremen, Germany.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09ZB64D3H
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (January 17, 2023)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 17, 2023
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 7897 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 412 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 198 ratings

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Heinrich Päs

Heinrich Päs

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Heinrich Päs is a German theoretical physicist and professor at TU Dortmund University. He received a PhD from the University of Heidelberg for research at the Max-Planck-Institut in 1999, held postdoc appointments at Vanderbilt University and the University of Hawaii, and an Assistant Professorship at the University of Alabama. His research on particle physics, cosmology and the structure of space and time was on the cover of the Scientific American and the New Scientist magazine. It also got included in the collector's edition "Ultimate Physics: From Quarks to the Cosmos", next to a piece by Stephen Hawking.

His first book “The Perfect Wave” dealt with neutrinos - the most puzzling particles we know about. It was praised in The Wall Street Journal, Nature, Economist, Publisher's Weekly, ZEIT, Welt and Deutschlandfunk.

His new book "The One" makes the scientific case for an ancient idea about the nature of the universe: that all is One. 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.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
198 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Stephanie Romer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great overview of monism
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024
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This was a fun read. But he doesn’t seem to understand just how ubiquitous and important the concept is in every single area of human knowledge—including psychology and brain science and our interpretation of symbols. He thinks that it can be “disproved” as an ancillary “theory” in science—when it’s the foundation for all. So he makes the same mistake he laments in the provincial interpretation of the one causing all the religious wars and fanaticism of the past. Even as he says it needs to apply to everyone. So it’s definitely something that you see or not. You can talk about things that you don’t understand but you should not see your ability to talk about things as meaning that you are capable of passing judgement on them. Everything and everyone exists and operates according to the one. Once you truly understand what it is, everything falls into place. I highly recommend this book, this guy is an excellent writer and this book is an absolutely vital resource for the next era in human culture and history. I absolutely love it and I love this man. I highly recommend this book. My highest recommendation. I only criticize those who write about the most important things—don’t take it the wrong way because it is in a spirit of love ❤️
2 people found this helpful
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Elton Hall
5.0 out of 5 stars Today's Science and Its Ancient Anticipations
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2023
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This book shows the profound links between ancient philosophy and equally ancient science and theories that include quantum physics and neuroscience. The author, a quantum physicist, effectively argues that the concept of a fundamental unity underlies all existence, and he traces this idea back to Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato and other early thinkers. He believes that this concept of oneness can explain all the features of the world--and it necessarily includes consciousness, too often ignored in the so-called "hard" sciences. His writing is clear straightforward and thus quite accessible to anyone interested in contemporary science--especially quantum physics--and the place of consciousness in the universe. This is an informative and exciting read.
6 people found this helpful
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Randall Peelen
4.0 out of 5 stars Thinking required
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2023
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I struggled a bit with this book. In order for the author to make his points, he had to review a lot of history in science, religion, and philosophy. This allowed him to argue his conclusions. In addition, as a physicist, he described things that were based in scientific thought and its vocabulary, and for me, that required some mental chewing. He referred to others who have held positions similar to his and one of them was Sean Carroll. Carroll is a bit better at storytelling (from my perspective).

The book was worth the effort it took to read it, and his conclusions offer an interesting and worthy argument.
15 people found this helpful
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Dan Ndubizu
5.0 out of 5 stars THE SILENT TRUTH OF NATURE:
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2023
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Albert Einstein once said:
“Understanding a problem as a whole is more important than solving the problem.”
The theory of everything must include consciousness, otherwise it is incomplete.

Nobody can disprove that quantum field is a diluted form of spirit.
Michael Faraday had a similar insight which lead to electromagnetism.
Everything is part of the ‘Whole’ but certain things are more fundamental than others.
The more fundamental things are, the more real they become. This means that Hydrogen and Oxygen are more real than water because if water is destroyed by evaporation, Hydrogen and Oxygen can still exist.
But if Hydrogen and Oxygen are destroyed first, water cannot remain.
Therefore, to say that something is an ‘Illusion’ is simply to say that it is not fundamental. Everything is real at the level of the observer but may shrink as the speed of the observer increases.

“All that we can ever know about any theory is the extent to which it seems to correspond to the real world observations we can make, and to the experiments we can do. Beyond that we never know the extent to which any of our theories capture the real reality of the universe, to the actual content of what really is out there…” —THE ONE, page 100.

Nature tells us little about nature.
Yet, nature tells us a lot about the human mind and its instruments.
Who said only physics has the right to the theory of everything?
The ONE means ‘Unknown Absolute’—the original quantum wave from which everything emanates.
Those who have had out-of-body experience as well as a knowledge of quantum physics think differently. In page 114 Heinrich Pas wrote:
“Yet, to Plato, metaphysics wasn’t unreal. In fact, it was more real than the observable phenomena; it was the real world rather than its shadow.”

Scientists tend to ignore pure spirituality but this book embraces it.
There is a quotation from—“The Flute Of God, page 192, by Paul Twitchell”. It states:
“Of course, the “indwelling” of all is Absolute Spirit. It is Spirit not yet differentiated into any specific manner. It is universal Spirit which pervades all things and is at the heart of all appearances. To come into the knowledge of this is to come into the secret of power, is to enter into the secret place of livingness.“

At the most basic human level, Absolute Spirit takes the shape of Love. That is why people with Love for what they do tend to excel. The human body is full of electrons, particles, charges and elements just like the distance galaxies.

Quantum systems undergo decoherence down to classical state.
So also the basics of monism is found in the simple concept that the ‘Unknown Absolute’ steps down into Divine Love.
And Divine Love steps down into cosmic Light and Sound.
And Cosmic Light and Sound steps down into the illusion of Particles, Matter, Forms, Energy, Space and Time.

Therefore, the theory of everything cannot succeed without including the human element.
In page 202, Heinrich Pas wrote:
“In modern particle physics, particles are understood as excitations of quantum fields rather than brick-like objects. It would be quantum fields rather than particles that provide the fundamental building blocks of the universe.“

Sri Harold Klemp wrote:
“Think of the trees, people, animals, buildings, and every other thing as fields of energy instead of objects you can touch.”
—page 239, Youths Ask A Modern Prophet about Life, Love, and God.

In page 136 of the book—The Tiger’s Fang, Paul Twitchell wrote:
…the universe is the non-dimensional continuum which the physical scientists are slowly discovering and in which the only reality is the action of the Sound Current, Spirit. Since Spirit is the sole reality, the study of It must become essential.”

Be it known that no law of physics or mathematics prohibits the possibility of increased electrical vibrations in the human body.
These vibrations could lead to out-of-body consciousness. After all, biochemistry tells us that every cell in the human body carries some electrical charges. Science does not know what exactly is this thing called electricity.
Sri Harold Klemp once said that “electricity is a diluted form of Spirit”. Perhaps this is why science does not know what electricity actually is.
There are quantum fields in the human body and outside the human body. Therefore, there is a possibility of finding a unification theory that includes both spirit and consciousness, since both are as omnipresent as quantum fields.
Nothing is more real than its own source.
Whatever is not prohibited is compulsory in the womb of human evolution.
For all universes tend to accommodate any energy that harmonizes with their laws.
The theory of everything shall approach life as an organic whole.

“All conditions of space, time, and causation are within the ECK. “
—The Shariyat Ki Sugmad, page 217 to 218.
This ECK is the cause of consciousness as we know it.
11 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

grid
5.0 out of 5 stars No News Is Good News: Science Is the New Religion
Reviewed in Germany on March 13, 2023
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Based on the bibliography it doesn't seem so, but still I cannot help but wonder if the author is acquainted with the work of Ken Wilber on this subject. Wilber's editorial work led to a book called "Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists" (first edition 1984, second edition 2001 - https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Questions-Mystical-Writings-Physicists/dp/1570627681 ) and it does address some of the same issues Päs is raising.

As Wilber puts it in 1983,

"modern physics offers no positive support (let alone proof) for a mystical worldview",

while in his 2001 edition's Preface he says:

"The common tendency, when faced with the truly ultimate issues of existence, is to assume-- or at least hope-- that physics and mysticism would somehow converge on a similar set of answers, that physics would somehow support or even prove a mystical worldview. This, after all, has been the message of countless books, from The Tao of Physics to The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

That simple conclusion, however, was not believed by any of the great physicists in this volume. From Einstein to Eddington, from Bohr to Planck, from Heisenberg to Pauli, they uniformly rejected that conclusion. They rejected the notion that physics proves or even supports mysticism, and yet every one of them was an avowed mystic."

H. Päs's worldview is quite compelling, but I believe he is mistaken to ascribe a monistic meaning to the discoveries of modern physics, however strong this taste may be. Heidegger's famous observation that "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht" ("Science does not think") goes along the same line of thought, meaning - in a way - that science cannot be the cake and eat it, too.

However, this book deserves 5 stars for being well researched, enthusiastic and... simply beautiful.
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