Time, Light, and the Dice of Creation

Time, Light, and the Dice of Creation: Through Paradox in Physics to a New Order

The laws of modern physics are seen as the bedrock of our understanding of the material world that surrounds us. The mathematics of Newton and Maxwell reliably describe behavior and events in the world and are the bases for our age of technology, from telephones to space travel.

Yet the founders of modern scientific thought such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli struggled to pin down the paradoxical concepts they needed for the “workable” theories of the subatomic and quantum world and its mysteries. At the height of the debate over the nature of matter, Einstein famously objected, “God does not play dice.”

Starting from the significance of zero and one, with their contrasting Eastern and Western philosophies, Philip Franses unravels the knots that surround elusive concepts such as matter, chance, time, light, darkness, emptiness, and form. Exploring current models in science, he poses these questions: Does light travel in time, or is it time that travels in light? How can emptiness hold potential? Can chance create order? What does our own experience mean in all this?

In this stimulating book, the author invites us on a journey and a life full of surprise and ambiguity, from paradoxes in physics to the meaning of time and the mythology of creation.

C O N T E N T S:

Introduction

The Dice of Existence

1. Division Faces Unity: Quantum Theory
2. Darkness Faces Light: Relativity
3. Past Faces Form: Electromagnetism

The Dice of Renewal

4. Chance Faces Order: The Fall
5. Potential Faces Expression: The Arising
6. Emptiness Faces Form: The Hub and the Rim

Creation

7. Energy Faces Time: Myth

Bibliography

About the Author

Philip Franses is Senior Lecturer in the MSc of Holistic Science at Schumacher College in Devon, England. His inquiry into science and spirit combines studying mathematics at Oxford and a career in computer science, with travels in Africa and the Alps in search of a ground of experience. He is the founding editor of Holistic Science Journal.