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The One - Heinrich Päs ****

At first glance this book has all the hallmarks of an attempt to tie quantum woo into ancient philosophical and religious beliefs, where some vague resemblance between an ancient observation about, say, 'the oneness of everything' and some aspect of quantum physics is given as evidence of the great wisdom of the ancients. In practice, if you make vague enough statements they can be said to prefigure anything - and have no connection to modern science. Thankfully, though, that's not what much of Heinrich Päs's book is about.

What Päs sets out to show is that the reason that quantum physics can seem strange, if not downright weird, is that we are looking at things from the wrong direction. Quantum physics is hugely successful at practical stuff - predicting what will happen to enable successful design of, for example, electronics, but doesn't have a big picture: there is no satisfactory explanation of what's going on 'under the hood'. Päs suggests this is because we're looking at it the wrong way - it is impossible, he suggests, to truly understand what's really happening from the reductive viewpoint of particles and their interaction, we need start from a holistic view of the universe because everything interacts with everything else.

There's some excellent material in here, including a really good historical summary of the way that quantum physics has managed to be hugely successful while at the same time physicists have papered over the cracks of what is really happening - what's sometimes referred to as 'shut up and calculate'. There's no doubt that most of the science here is, while speculative, based on solid physics. (This is as opposed to the theology, for example, where Päs conjures up a totally fictional and rather hilarious battle between his ‘monism’ view of quantum mechanics and monotheistic religions, inevitably deploying Giordano Bruno.)

What's less sure, though, is whether or not this speculation is anything more than vaguely interesting. Päs suggests that the way to get to what's really happening is to start from the universe as a whole. This can be both technically true and practically useless. For example, you might argue the only way to fundamentally understand why you decided to have croissants for breakfast was to gather data on every single one of the 1027 atoms in your body. This may in principle be true, but in practice is totally useless as we both can't collect the data and can't do anything with it in a useful way. Similarly, we might get a better understanding of what is really happening when two quantum particles interact by studying the universe as a whole - but practically speaking it won't tell us anything.

It's also true that the book doesn't entirely avoid falling into the ancient wisdom trap. For example, we read 'as startling as it is, as long as fifty centuries ago the ancient Egyptians knew something very similar to entanglement'. That's on a par with Erich von Daniken in Chariots of the Gods saying that the book of Ezekiel in the Bible describes a spaceship. No - it's retrofitting a vague imagining from the past to a unlinked modern scientific idea and has no value.

As long as you can resist groaning at these references to ancient parallels, there's indubitably interesting content here, which is why I've given it four stars. However, despite the tag line calling this the 'future of physics', the monism concept at its heart is ascientific - it's highly unlikely it will ever be experimentally provable or have any meaningful impact on physical theory.  I am far more interested in popular science that describes theory that links to experiment and has practical value, but as an exploration of one of the less painful aspects of such speculation, this still makes for an interesting read.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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