Pathways of Chance is the delightful and often humorous telling of the life, experiences and ideas of the physicist and writer F. David Peat (author of twenty books including Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind, Blackfoot Physics, Superstrings, The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind and From Certainty to Uncertainty). Beginning with his boyhood in an eccentric family in wartime Liverpool it takes us through the swinging sixties of the Beatles, theoretical research in Canada, and finally his settling in the tiny medieval village of Pari in Italy. It explores his meetings with such people as David Bohm, Roger Penrose, Bertrand Russell and Sir Michael Tippett. It engages us with accounts of a talking circle in a tepee with Native American Elders to dialogues with leading artists. Yet each step of this life story is also an exciting encounter with ideas including the elusive nature of quantum reality, the Blackfoot world of flux and transformation, the limits to what can be said, Jung and Synchronicity, creativity within the human body, David Bohm's implicate order, art and film and, finally, the need for new forms of ethical action in the world. Larry Dossey has described the book as "a moveable feast", while Fred Alan Wolf writes that it is "an honest from-the-heart answer" to the question as to what makes physicists tick. Peat has a Renaissance mind and we learn of his excursions into film, radio and theatre. He has a gift for bridging disciplines and bringing complex ideas to life in an exciting and engaging way. His lucid writing illuminates everything from the meaning of quantum reality, the way language influences the way we see the world, the Blackfoot world view and much, much more.
Welcome to my Amazon page. One of the most enjoyable tasks of my life has been writing books. Or rather lying in bed dreaming about what I want to write tomorrow then jumping out of bed in the morning and rushing to my computer to get it all down before I forget! And what a pleasure it was to see my latest book in print "A Flickering Reality" which was such a joy to write because it combined by interests in the changing nature of reality along with the chance to revisit so many films I had enjoyed in the past along with some very new ones.
I was born and grew up in Liverpool. My father was an electrician and when his apprentice announced that he would quit to go to Germany with his band my father told him, "George Harrison, one day you'll come crawling on your hands and knees to get your job back." I was also a little annoyed when my closest friend, Dot, told me she was seeing a really fascinating student at art college - John Lennon!
After university I moved to Canada to carry out research in theoretical physics. Then while on a sabbatical with Roger Penrose I met the physicist David Bohm and began a friendship that lasted until his death. Indeed, we were working on a second book together when he died.
I had also been involved in documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was responsible for a twenty one-hour series on the development of physics in the 20th century. After leaving the National Research Council of Canada I turned to writing both books and plays for radio and the stage. I also made contact with Native American groups which ended up as a circle of Native Elders and Western Scientists sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. Some these experiences found themselves in "Blackfoot Physics".
From Ottawa we moved briefly, and totally by chance, to the medieval hilltop village of Pari in Tuscany, and from there moved to London so I could write
"Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm". In London I made contact with the artists Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley and ended up organizing a weekend where artists and scientists could meet and talk informally.
From London I moved back to Pari and in 2000 opened the Pari Center for New Learning in order to run courses and conferences and have writers and artists come to visit for a month or so. Pari has also been an ideal place in which to reflect and write and to meet new people. It has also been a time when I have developed my idea of Gentle Action which can be found at www.gentleaction.org and well as in my book "Gentle Action: Bringing creative change to a turbulent world".
My latest book is "A Flickering Reality: Cinema and the Nature of Reality". The shows how everthing from Freud and Jung, quantum theory and chaos theory, the neurosciences and postmodernism have changed the way we look at ourselves and the world, and the most direct way to experience this is via films. I also have a blog on this at http://aflickeringreality.blogspot.com.
If you'd like to learn more then why not buy my biography, "Pathways of Chance" or look at my website www.fdavidpeat.com or www.paricenter.com.
