The One - by Heinrich Päs (Hardcover)

About the Book

""From all things One and from One all things," wrote the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. You might read this as a platitude, or as a pleasant spiritual or philosophical idea. You probably wouldn't read it as a more-or-less accurate scientific statement about the nature of the universe. Particle physicist Heinrich Pèas, however, does. In The One, Pèas makes the surprising and compelling case for monism-the philosophical idea that one single, all-encompassing thing underlies everything we experience-rehabilitating the idea's reputation and reclaiming it for science. At first glance, the idea that "all is one" seems patently absurd. But Pèas reveals that monism follows logically from certain principles of quantum mechanics once they are applied to the entire universe. He shows how monism is not only a feasible theory from a scientific perspective but a potentially powerful solution to the stagnation of thought in contemporary physics, arguing that if physics is ever to progress, physicists must learn to embrace insights from outside the narrow silo of experimental knowledge. Along the way, Pèas traces monism's often-buried 3000-year history, passing through the lives of a diverse array of great thinkers, including Plato, Galileo, Spinoza, and Goethe, and the churchmen, philosophers, and physicists who fought against monism as well. The result is an epic and expansive journey through thousands of years of human thought and into the nature of reality itself. Equal parts physics, philosophy, and history of ideas, The One is of the rare sort of book that can both the first-time reader with its marvels and revolutionize the worldview of even the most experienced physics buff"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A work of impressive scholarship."--Jung Journal

"A heady mix of history, philosophy and cutting-edge theory that is fascinating [and] provocative... [Päs's] dizzying tour through the monist multiverse is stimulating and engrossing."--Wall Street Journal

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

"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-worlds 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, author of Existential Physics

"Päs delivers an entertaining and enlightening tour of physics, religion, and philosophy, yielding a monistic vision of fundamental reality as a vast unified whole: The One. In place of the pluralist image of a world composed from many little particles, Päs offers an image of one entangled cosmos from which all else emerges. The result is an important new program for physics based on quantum cosmology, from which space, time, particles, and all the rest are to be derived from the universal wave function via decoherence--a new hope for our understanding of fundamental reality."--Jonathan Schaffer, Rutgers University

"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

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.