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

In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Pas 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. Pas 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. AUTHOR: Heinrich Pas 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. —- ISBN: 9781837730292 | ISBN10: 1837730296 | ISBN-13: 978-1837730292