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

by Heinrich Päs

Little known is that on February 16, 1923, almost exactly four years before Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty principle in Copenhagen, when the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, thunderstruck by the riches he found, he also encountered one of the earliest manifestations of monism. Next to mummies, the solid-gold coffin, the famous face mask, thrones, chariots, and more than five thousand other artifacts—“everywhere the glint of gold,” as Carter described it30—there was a statue of “Neith,” protecting the pharaoh’s sarcophagus, as one of four tutelary deities. Neith, one of the oldest goddesses described in the Pyramid Texts, the ancient hieroglyphic writings carved into subterranean walls and sarcophagi starting from the third millennium BCE onward, was worshiped in the sanctuary of Sais, among the most important cult centers of Egypt, as “the mother and father of all things.”