TIME, LIGHT AND THE DICE OF CREATION

The subtitle of Philip Franses's book is Through Paradox in Physics to a New Order. Franses takes the reader in a journey through modern physics. However, his book is ultimately less about physics, and more about how we think and approach physics. Central to his approach is the notion of paradox, and the many instances where paradox comes up. The best known example is the Copenhagen Interpretation of subatomic particles. A particle can be described as a wave or a particle, depending on how it interacts; depending also on the experiment that we design. What is it really? Most physicists dismiss the paradox as unimportant. Advice given to university students is usually, "shut up and calculate". However, Frances views the paradox as essential, and suggests that we not only embrace it, but recognise that it is characteristic of the nature of the universe. Time, for example, can be viewed as travelling forwards or backwards. We live in a world of paradox, of irreconcilable dualities: darkness and light, chance and order, emptiness and form, zero and unity. The Western description of nature takes an either-or approach to paradox. The human mind trained with Aristotelian logic is uncomfortable with paradox. The notion of "both" requires us to embrace paradox. What if, by embracing paradox we would come to a radically new description of the universe?

The chapters expand on each of the above dualities and how those arise in nature. His arguments are non-linear in the sense that the reader will have to let go of how he/she is used to thinking about dualities to appreciate what the writer is getting at. The central chapters of the book deal with Goethean Science, which appears to be a major influence in Franses's thinking. Those chapters are the easiest to follow and offer a clear account of Goethe's approach to science and how it differs from conventional approaches. Franses explores the relationship between the seed and the plant, how plant forms develop, how petals develop from primary structures.

The author's approach is somewhat Platonic, in that the most fundamental constituents of nature are viewed as dualities; pairs of opposites. The world we observe emanates from a hidden world of archetypes. At the root is zero and unity, potential and existence, form versus emptiness. Interestingly, such dualities also occur in many religious traditions including early Christian Gnosticism. Franses recognises this mythical dimension in his final section where he looks at the nature of time. Time is only incidental to quantum mechanics, as if it doesn't really exist. So where is it? What is its role? All creation myths tell the story of how time began. Particularly Hindu myths. He writes,

We have forgotten where time in the equations came from. We have forgotten the treasure of time, which is what oriented us, hidden underneath the ground of all this mathematics and physics. "t" is still there but everyone has forgotten what it represented. We have taken away from ourselves the very thing we need to live, the very story that organized us and orders us.

Overall, this book challenges the reader to adopt a new way of thinking about nature. To embrace paradox and see where that leads. Those who take the time and effort, and it will take an effort to follow the author's argument, will be rewarded by some startling new insights.