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

by Heinrich Päs

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541674851
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	313,926
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

10/17/2022

Physicist Päs (The Perfect Wave) argues that “all is one” in this overly knotty survey of monism, or the belief that “in a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single ‘One.’” Though the notion may sound “bizarre to us,” he suggests it follows “straightforwardly from quantum mechanics.” Contending that monism holds truths about physics and is also rooted in philosophy, Päs bolsters his case with biographical snippets of Plato (who “assumed that hidden on the most fundamental level there exists only one single object in the universe: the universe itself”), Leonardo Da Vinci (who believed in the harmony of nature), Mozart (who, Päs notes, was “inspired” by monism), and Albert Einstein (who argued for “an objective reality beyond what can be observed”). Though the philosophical discussions are easy to grasp, if a bit winding, Päs is less successful when it comes to science, and his explanations can be tough to parse (“gauge symmetries relate the existence of forces to the freedom to redefine physics differently, in different patches of space-time, and thus reveal the coherence of space-time”). Theoretical physicists might find some fascinating concepts worth considering, but lay readers are likely to be left scratching their heads. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"A work of impressive scholarship.”—Jung Journal

“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

“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

“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

From the Publisher

2022-11-08
The universe explained by a particle physicist.

Päs, a professor of theoretical physics and author of The Perfect Wave, examines “what we actually mean when we talk about ‘the universe.’ ” It can’t be everything we see at night; our Milky Way Galaxy, which has 100 billion stars, is only one of trillions of galaxies. It can’t be everything astronomers see because invisible gas clouds contain 10 times more matter. It can’t be ordinary matter because there is five times more “dark matter,” whose exotic makeup no one understands. The universe itself may be a meaningless concept because there may be an innumerable number of them in an uncountable proliferating “multiverse.” Standing under the stars, Päs feels that he is one with the universe. The notion that everything in the universe is part of one unified whole is called “monism,” a belief that was codified by the ancient Greeks. Most scholars agree that the Greeks invented science and made important discoveries. They also got many things wrong, but Päs focuses on philosophy, where even concepts of “right” and “wrong” are debatable. The author devotes the first third of the book to his specialty, quantum physics, in which “objects get so completely and entirely merged that it is impossible to say anything at all about the properties of their constituents anymore.” Serious explanations of quantum physics require close attention, so most readers will breathe a sigh of relief when Päs switches gears to deliver a history of science and religion in Western culture, which he describes as a battle between Christianity and monistic scholars, who were persecuted until the Renaissance, when modern science revived the ideas of ancient Greece. Päs has no doubt that the great thinkers (e.g., Spinoza and Kant) and scientists (Galileo, Newton, Einstein) were monists. This is difficult stuff, but the glossary helps.

A dense philosophical exploration of the cosmos—not for the faint of heart.

Kirkus Reviews