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

(Hardback)

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In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Ps presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole.


This idea, called monism, has a rich 3,000-year history: Plato believed that 'all is one', but monism was later rejected as irrational and suppressed as a heresy by the medieval Church. Nevertheless, monism persisted, inspiring Enlightenment science and Romantic poetry.

Ps shows how monism could inspire physics today, how it could slice through the intellectual stagnation that has bogged down progress in modern physics and help science achieve the 'grand theory of everything' that 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

'[A] heady mix of history, philosophy and cutting-edge theory that is fascinating, provocative ... stimulating and engrossing.' Wall Street Journal

'The history is thoroughly researched, the physics is cutting edge and Ps's larger point resonates: much, or maybe all, of what we take for reality is an artifact of our limited perspectives.' Scientific American


'It has always been the dream of philosophers to have all matter built up from one fundamental type of particle," said Paul Dirac in 1930. With expert guidance from Heinrich Ps, in The One we glimpse the scale and grandeur of the dream in one of its modern forms: everything is quantum information.' Jim Baggott, author of Atomic and Quantum Reality


'Usually we say the universe is made of particles, but Ps 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


'Are we one with the universe It is a question as old as mankind ... But Ps 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

Author Bio

Heinrich Ps 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.