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

by Heinrich Päs

So if everything exists exclusively in our minds, and if our minds are nothing but information, doesn’t this again imply that everything is information? It appears as if we are running in circles,

Maybe we should do the converse: understand the classical, on-screen reality as information about the quantum realm; see the movie plot experienced on-screen as information about what exists in the projector room rather than understanding the film roll as information about the story that unfolds on the screen.

However you turn it: In the Beginning Was the Wave Function.”

Instead of conceiving the wave function as a tool providing information about the potential behavior of the classical objects in everyday life, this new view suggests nothing less than the contrary: classical objects, space, time, and matter have to be conceived as information about the underlying quantum reality.

Once more we can stress the parallels with Plato, who envisaged the way to truth as a strenuous ascent out of the cave, or with the metaphor of the veiled Isis, whose veil provides us with limited information about what hides beneath it.

any conglomeration of particles is nothing but a specific perspective on the all-encompassing One.

physics can only move forward by building on quantum cosmology instead of particles or strings.

What enabled Greek philosophers, East Asian sages, oriental mystics, and medieval thinkers to come up with ideas that are so breathtakingly close to modern physics, without having the slightest clue about the experimental progress that made it possible?

If “the One” is the hardware of this quantum world we are about to enter, it also will become more important and meaningful for us. How will it feel for us to live in a universe that is “One” on its most foundational level? How would such a revolution in our grasp of the universe feed back into our daily lives? Can it, in some sense, make us better humans?

“The pantheist ‘God’ is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a ‘We,’ and a we in the broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing everything from rocks and algae, through butterflies and humans, to suns and planets,”