What Amit Goswami can express poetically, in 'The Self-Aware Universe', not many can express it ever in words. But his poetry, to paraphrase Emerson, has an edge to it. The edge is quantum physics.
Goswami’s genius is his ability to express very complex insights and relationships in a simple poetic language that even the lay reader can understand.
When I saw Goswami in the Bleep movie, I was already impressed by his unconventional yet powerfully convincing appearance, but when I read him line by line, it was an intellectual pleasure for me I seldom had when reading a science book.
While Goswami leaves no doubt that he defends the monistic paradigm in spirituality, which clearly means taking sides when you do this as a scientist, I respect it because he has justified his spiritual paradigm scientifically. I can say that Goswami’s view of the universe sounds very coherent to me, and from his general style and reputation, this man is not a lighthearted spirit—pretty much to the contrary.
This being said, this book is not an easy read. I had to fight through because mathematics never was my strong point, which is why I was thankful for Goswami’s wistful mix of mathematical and poetic explanations of his vision—and that is something unusual in our mechanistic science tradition—while it was not unusual in the Renaissance.
Many of us would like to boost their scientific understanding without however having to digest volumes of mathematical gibberish, and pages of formulas. Capra and Goswami, and a growing number of other scientists today show that it does not need to be that way, and that knowledge, whatever level of complexity it assumes, is transmissible in ordinary language. And for describing the paradoxes of quantum physics, I haven’t found an author who can explain them with similar ease.
Goswami shows that relativity theory’s speed of the light limitation is none when applied to subatomic physics since we are dealing not with matter, but with waves, contradicting physicists who speak in this case about exceptions from relativity theory. No, the wave behavior of electrons doesn’t represent an exception from relativity theory as relativity applies for matter only, for mass, and not for waves.
In a similar mood and with the same eloquence, Goswami explains why we need to overcome the Cartesian dualism.
With the same lucidity, Goswami discusses and eventually rejects material realism as a foundation for any kind of holistic science of the future.
What many people ignore, in fact, is that quantum physics did not per se establish a holistic science paradigm. Capra discussed this question in The Turning Point (1987), pointing out that quantum physics is restricted to the subatomic realm, while in conventional physics the Newtonian mechanics is still valid.
This is why, as Goswami discusses at length, the mere decision pro or con quantum physics does not change much in the landscape of physics. What does this change, Goswami says, is the philosophy behind the screens.
And here he points out with many examples how physics is shaped by the underlying spiritual or non-spiritual paradigm.
It seems that Goswami’s choice of philosophical monism was not just the result of cultural conditioning. As he explains, and as it is well-known, India in the whole of its philosophical tradition adhered to spiritual monism, and idealism.
But the strength of Goswami’s coherent view of modern physics is that he carefully double-checked the results of all the various philosophical constructs, in their effect on scientific observation at the quantum level.
On the other hand, his clear choice of a spiritual direction may interfere in some ways with his scientific objectivity. When a quantum physicist makes such a spiritual choice as a base paradigm also for his research, I must question his objectiveness.
I will stop my comments here in the hope that this information is sufficient to raise your interest in the present book, and take the challenge to read it.
While the book is written in a good conversational English and without too much science gibberish, a robust ability to follow convoluted and complex philosophical, and to a lesser extent, mathematical explanations is required.
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While the big picture is evocative, the details about psychology are often mistaken
The book and the basic ideas are very intriguing and evocative. Nevertheless, I am troubled that when the author ventures into territory that I have knowledge about, he is often off the mark and/or mistaken. He writes that he agrees with Neisser that the field of psychology is not ready to tackle the topic of consciousness and furthermore contends that the field of physics is. This is an ignorant position: psychology has been trying to come to grips with the topic of consciousness since a least James in the 19th century. There are volumes dedicated to the psychology and biopsychology of consciousness. Perhaps Goswami should read some of them enough to understand that, for example, the superior colliculi are located in the midbrain (not the hindbrain, as Goswami has stated). His errors would be more forgivable if he was more humble.
Top reviews from other countries
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in India on March 6, 2017
Fusion of Indian and western science--broad strokes.
- AJReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 21, 2015
A Very interesting, Informative & Enjoyable Book..
- Sue IReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2021
returned as too much science terminology for me to follow
