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The Theory of One
Art by Christopher Bek

Philosophymagazine

Abstract

Introduction

Endeavor to think
well, for it is the only morality.

—Saint
Augustine

The universe was
created with time and not in time.

—Saint
Augustine

The first step
forward is to see that attention is fastened on the truth.

—Saint
Augustine

Miracles happen,
not in opposition to nature, but in opposition to what we know of nature.

—Saint
Augustine

The functional
harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to
God.

—Lincoln Barnett

Right now it is
a question whether scientific man is in touch with reality at all—or can
ever hope to be.

—Lincoln Barnett

The mathematical
orthodoxy of the universe enables theorists like Einstein to predict and
discover natural laws simply by the solution of equations.

—Lincoln Barnett

The human eye
suppresses most of the light in the world and what man perceives of the
reality around him is distorted and enfeebled by the limitations of his
organ of vision.

—Lincoln Barnett

Quantum theory
deals with fundamental units of matter and energy. Relativity deals with
space, time and the structure of the universe as a whole. Both are accepted
pillars of modern physical thought.

—Lincoln Barnett

The fundamental
question of whether light is waves or particles has never been answered. The
dual character of light is, however, only one aspect of a deeper and more
remarkable duality which pervades all nature.

—Lincoln Barnett

It is perhaps
significant that in terms of simple magnitude man is the mean between
macrocosm and microcosm. Stated crudely this means that a supergiant red
star is just as much bigger than man as an electron is smaller.

—Lincoln Barnett

Gradually
philosophers and scientists have arrived at the startling conclusion that
since every object is simply the sum of its qualities, and since qualities
exist only in the mind, the whole objective universe of matter and energy,
atoms and stars, does not exist except as a construction of the
consciousness—an edifice of conventional symbols shaped by the senses of
man.

—Lincoln Barnett

The element of
caprice in atomic behavior cannot be blamed on man’s coarse-grained
implements. It stems from the very nature of things, as shown by Heisenberg
in 1927 in his famous statement of physical law known as the Uncertainty
Principle.

—Lincoln Barnett

In this vast
cosmic picture the abyss between macrocosmos and microcosmos—the very big
and the very little—will be bridged, and the whole complex of the universe
will resolve into a homogeneous fabric in which matter and energy are
indistinguishable and all forms of motion from the slow wheeling of the
galaxies to the wild flight of electrons become simply changes in the
structure and concentration of the primordial field.

—Lincoln Barnett

Today most
newspaper readers know vaguely that Einstein had something to do with the
atomic bomb—beyond that his name is simply a synonym for the abstruse.
While his theories form part of the body of modern science, they are not yet
part of the modern curriculum. It is not surprising therefore that many a
college graduate still thinks of Einstein as a kind of mathematical
surrealist rather than as the discoverer of certain cosmic laws of immense
importance in man’s slow struggle to understand physical reality.

—Lincoln Barnett

In man’s brief
tenancy on earth he egocentrically orders events in his mind according to
his own feelings past, present, and future. But except on the reels of
one’s own consciousness, the universe, the objective world of reality,
does not happen—it simply exists. It can be encompassed in its entire
majesty only by a cosmic intellect. But it can also be represented
symbolically, by a mathematician, as a four-dimensional spacetime continuum.
An understanding of the spacetime continuum is requisite to a comprehension
of the general theory of relativity and of what it says about gravitation,
the unseen force that holds the universe together and determines its shape
and size.

—Lincoln Barnett

Relativity, like
the quantum theory, draws man’s intellect still farther away from the
Newtonian universe, firmly rooted in space and time and functioning like
some great, unerring, and manageable machine. Einstein’s laws of motion, his
basic principles of the relativity of distance, time, and mass, and his
deductions from these principles comprise what is known as the special
theory of relativity. In the decade following the publication of this
original work, he expanded his scientific and philosophical system into the
general theory of relativity, through which he examined the mysterious force
that guides the whirling of the stars, comets, meteors, and galaxies, and
all the moving systems of iron, stone, vapor, and flame in the immense
inscrutable void. Newton called this force universal gravitation. From his
own concept of gravitation Einstein attained a view of the vast architecture
and anatomy of the universe as a whole.

—Lincoln Barnett

The other
gateway to this knowledge may be opened by the Unified Field Theory upon
which Einstein has been at work for a quarter century. Today the outer
limits of man’s knowledge are defined by Relativity, the inner limits by
the Quantum Theory. Relativity has shaped all our concepts of space, time,
gravitation, and the realities that are too remote and too vast to be
perceived. Quantum Theory has shaped all our concepts of the atom, the basic
units of matter and energy, and the realities that are too elusive and too
small to be perceived. Yet these two great scientific systems rest on
entirely different and unrelated theoretical foundations. The purpose of
Einstein’s Unified Field Theory is to construct a bridge between them.
Believing in the harmony and uniformity of nature, Einstein hopes to evolve
a single edifice of physical laws that will encompass both the phenomena of
the atom and the phenomena of outer space. Just as Relativity reduced
gravitational force to a geometrical peculiarity of the spacetime continuum,
the Unified Field Theory will reduce electromagnetic force—the other great
universal force—to equivalent status.

—Lincoln
Barnett

A few years ago
Einstein observed that the idea there are two structures of space
independent of each other, the metric—gravitational and the
electromagnetic is intolerable to the theoretical spirit. Moreover, as
Relativity showed that energy has mass and mass is congealed energy, the
Unified Field Theory will regard matter simply as a concentration of field.
From its perspective the entire universe will be revealed as an elemental
field in which each star, each atom, each wandering comet and slow-wheeling
galaxy and flying electron is seen to be but a ripple or tumescence in the
underlying spacetime unity. And so a profound simplicity will supplant the
surface complexity of nature; the distinction between gravitational and
electromagnetic force, between matter and field, between electric charge and
field will be forever lost; and matter, gravitation, and electromagnetic
force will all thus resolve into configurations of the four-dimensional
continuum which is the universe.

—Lincoln Barnett

Completion of
the Unified Field Theory will climax the long march of science towards
unification of concepts. For within its framework all man’s perceptions of
the world and all his abstract intuitions of reality—matter, energy,
force, space, time merge finally into one. It touches the grand aim of all
science, which, as Einstein defines it, is to cover the greatest number of
empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of
hypotheses or axioms. The urge to consolidate premises, to unify concepts,
to penetrate the variety and particularity of the manifest world to the
undifferentiated unity that lies beyond is not only the leaven of science;
it is the loftiest passion of the human intellect. The philosopher and
mystic, as well as the scientist, have always sought through their various
disciplines of introspection to arrive at a knowledge of the ultimate
immutable essence that undergirds the mutable illusory world. More than
twenty-three hundred years ago Plato declared—The true lover of knowledge
is always striving after being. He will not rest at those multitudinous
phenomena whose existence is appearance only.

—Lincoln Barnett

Since time is an
impalpable quantity it is not possible to draw a picture or construct a
model of a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. But it can be imagined and
it can be represented mathematically. And in order to describe the
stupendous reaches of the universe beyond our solar system, beyond the
clusters and star clouds of the Milky Way, beyond the lonely outer galaxies
burning in the void, the scientist must visualize it all as a continuum in
three dimensions of space and one of time. In our minds we tend to separate
these dimensions; we have an awareness of space and an awareness of time.
But the separation is purely subjective; and as special relativity showed,
space and time separately are relative quantities which vary with individual
observers. In any objective description of the universe, such as science
demands, the time dimension can no more be detached from the space dimension
than length can be detached from breadth and thickness in an accurate
representation of a house, a tree, or Betty Grable. According to the great
German mathematician, Herman Minkowski, who developed the mathematics of the
spacetime continuum as a convenient medium for expressing the principles of
relativity—Space and time separately have vanished into mere shadows—and
only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality.

—Lincoln Barnett

In its popular
sense, mass is just another word for weight. But as used by the physicist,
it denotes a rather different and more fundamental property of
matter—namely, resistance to a change of motion. A greater force is
necessary to move a freight car than a velocipede; the freight car resists
motion more stubbornly than the velocipede because it has greater mass. In
classical physics the mass of any body is a fixed and unchanging property.
Thus the mass of a freight car should remain the same whether it is at rest
on a siding, rolling across country at 60 miles an hour, or hurtling through
outer space at 60,000 miles a second. But relativity asserts that the mass
of a moving body is by no means constant, but increases with its velocity.
The old physics failed to discover this fact simply because man’s senses and
instruments are too crude to note the infinitesimal increases of mass
produced by the feeble accelerations of ordinary experience. They become
perceptible only when bodies attain velocities close to that of light. And
this phenomenon does not conflict with the relativistic contraction of
length. One is tempted to ask how can an object become smaller and at the
same time get heavier? The contraction, it should be noted, is only in the
direction of motion; width and breadth are unaffected. Moreover mass is not
heaviness but simply the resistance to motion.

—Lincoln
Barnett

In the evolution
of scientific thought, one fact has become impressively clear—that there
is no mystery of the physical world which does not point to a mystery beyond
itself.  All highroads of the
intellect, all byways of theory and conjecture lead ultimately to an abyss
that human ingenuity can never span.  For
man is enchained by the very condition of his Being, his finiteness and his
involvement in nature.  The
further he extends his horizons, the more vividly he recognizes the fact
that, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, we are both spectators and actors
in the great drama of existence.  Man
is thus his own greatest mystery.  He
does not understand the vast veiled universe into which he has been cast for
the reason that he does not understand himself.
He comprehends little of his organic process and even less of his
unique capacity to perceive the world about him in his rationality and his
dreams.  Least of all does he
understand his noblest and most mysterious faculty—the ability to
transcend himself by perceiving himself in the act of perception.
Man’s inescapable impasse is that he himself is part of the world
that he seeks to explore—his body and proud brain are but mosaics of the
same elemental particles that compose the dark, drifting clouds of
interstellar space.  Man is, in
the final analysis, merely an ephemeral confirmation of the primordial
spacetime field.  Standing
midway between macrocosm and microcosm, he finds barriers on every side and
can perhaps but marvel, as Saint Paul did nineteen hundred years ago in
saying that the world was created by the word of God so that what is seen is
composed of things which do not appear.

—Lincoln
Barnett

Relativistic Physics. All indications suggested that the world of physics was on the verge of completion a hundred years ago. There were comprehensive theories in place for describing the two known universal forces—gravity and electromagnetism. Newtonian physics effectively characterized gravity and the mechanics of all physical bodies in the universe. The differential equations of Maxwell served to portray the waves mechanics of visible light and other electromagnetic forces. At the time scientists believed the universe was a deterministic, clock-like machine. Linear or special relativity in 1905 revealed that space and time are in fact the new concept of spacetime, and that spacetime dilates as a function of velocity relative to lightspeed—ie. c=186,284 miles per second. Essentially what Einstein did with relativity was to encapsulate Newtonian physics into Maxwellian waves mechanics such that we could then understand how dimensions compressed and mass increased as physical bodies were accelerated towards lightspeed. By following this line thought of through to its logical conclusion Einstein realized that energy and matter were simply different forms of the same substance—ie. E=mc^2—which was then the starting point for the development of the atomic bomb. We can also see that by taking the dilation of spacetime to the limit that bodies traveling at light­speed exist at the very boundary of spacetime—something that neither Einstein nor any physicist since Einstein has been able to figure out—for which further evidence can be seen with the claim of both Einstein and Stephen Hawking that the universe is unbounded. Nonlinear or general relativity in 1915 then revealed that gravity and inertia are the very same thing. In summary, when we study the whirling of the stars, comets, meteors, galaxies and other celestial bodies, the basis of our calculations are Newtonian but with relativistic adjustments for the dilation and warping of spacetime.

Quantum Physics. While relativity speaks to the macrocosmos, quantum physics concerns itself with the nature of matter at the microcosmic level. And while the practical application of relativity is limited to the study of the universe at large, quantum theory is the basis for all electronic equipment like televisions, computers, laser disk players and all the electronics used by hospitals and the police. Quantum theory explains the periodic table and why chemical reactions take place. It is therefore the basis of chemistry, which is the basis of biology, which is the basis of all medical science. Quantum theory is therefore the basis for both the theory and practice of medicine. Quantum mechanics is essentially the modeling of the atom which began with the 1911 revelation of Rutherford, who did some of his quantum development at McGill University in Montreal, that both the solar system and the atom have nuclei containing about 99.9 percent of the mass and occupying about one-billionth of the spherical space. In 1925 Schrödinger proposed an atomic model based on a very simple wave equation. If one imagines dropping a pebble in the ocean, then the ripples that form become the valance rings of the orbiting electrons. But the unexpected surprise was that the waves are representative of the probability of finding an electron at any given point—with the wave crests representing the highest probabilities. So disgusted was Schrödinger with this probabilistic interpretation of his wave equation that he formulated his classic cat-in-a-box thought problem in 1935 with the intention of demonstrating the absurdity of the probabilistic interpretation once and for all—A quantum-cat is placed in a box such that no one can know what is happening inside. A device releases either food or poison with equal probability, and the cat meets its fate—or does it? Schrödinger argued that for the probabilistic interpretation to be true that the cat must be both alive and dead until the observer opens the box. Another unexpected surprise came with the realization that the cat is in fact both alive and dead until the consciousness of the observer determines its fate. This was just too much for Schrödinger to bare and he walked away from quantum physics forever saying that he wish he never had anything to do with it. And even today physicists focus exclusively on practical applications and avoid the topic of consciousness altogether. Stephen Hawking said that every time someone mentions Schrödinger’s Cat, I go for my gun. The Cambridge physicist John Polkhorne once said that your average quantum mechanic is about a philosophically minded as your average garage mechanic.

Singularistic Metaphysics. In normal physics a singularity is a breakdown in spacetime such that the laws of physics no longer apply. Typical examples of singularities include the big bang, black holes and one divided by zero. Unfortunately what physicists like Stephen Hawking who developed the concept of singularities failed to realize is that a breakdown in spacetime is just another way of saying a boundary between spacetime and nothingness. Special relativity in 1905 revealed that spacetime dilates as a function of velocity relative to lightspeed in accordance with the Pythagorean theorem. By taking the dilation of spacetime to the limit we see that bodies traveling at light­speed exist at the boundary of spacetime—thus revealing lightspeed to be a singularity. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in 1927 characterized the inherent uncertainty in quantum physics by stating that causality breaks down at Planck’s constant. An examination of causality reveals it to be nothing more than a temporal ordering of things. An absence of temporal ordering, by definition, implies an absence of spacetime—therefore revealing Planck’s constant to be a boundary of spacetime and thusly a singularity. My theory of one recognizes lightspeed and Planck’s constant are the same boundary of the spacetime continuum. And by recognizing the boundedness of the universe, we can see that metaphysics and physics (ie. philosophy and science) separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality. We must also recognize that the only reason philosophy and science ever drifted apart from the time of Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Berkley and Pascal during the seventeenth century Renaissance is that people like Stephen Hawking, RB Hicks of the University of Calgary, Helmy Sherif of the University of Alberta and Ivan L’Heureux of the University of Ottawa arbitrarily chose to specialize in physics only rather than follow the more comprehensive approach taken by the heros of the Renaissance.

Unified Field Theory. In 1909 Hermann Minkowski wrote that space and time separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality. Ironically, Minkowski was also Einstein’s university professor and had described Einstein as a lazy dog who never bothered with mathematics at all—which makes sense given that Einstein sought elemental conceptual pictures first before considering mathematical complexities. In addition to failing to recognize that lightspeed and Planck’s constant are the same boundary of the spacetime continuum, Einstein also failed to recognize the fact that consciousness is the apparatus of perception by which we comprehend reality. Philosophers and scientists have never been truly able to rationalize the equivalence of space and time for the simple reason that they failed to recognize that the true essence of spacetime is different than our conscious perception of space and time. Einstein’s contemporary Sir James Jeans once described the relativistic four-dimensional spacetime continuum as the surface of four-dimensionally corrugated soap bubbles. And we can see quite obviously that Jeans’ characterization of the spacetime continuum bares no resemblance to our perception of space and time for the simple reason that he was describing its essence. My unified field theory solves the problem Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life working on by recognizing conscious as electrons or monads—ie. metaphysical gonads—which is a concept formulated by Gottfried Leibniz, who also co-formulated calculus with Newton. Leibniz’s theory of monads are the metaphysical counterpoint to Newton’s theory of gravity—which we know from Einstein’s general relativity is exactly the same as inertia. Thus we can see that Leibniz’s monads are ultimately equivalent to Newton’s gravity. Specifically, the unified field theory recognizes what we call consciousness as the accumulation of inertial effects experienced by the monads in their travels through relativistic bubbles. Without a doubt the unified field theory radically changes our conception of reality and in fact marks the turningpoint in the history of mankind.

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