Physics and Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality - Softcover

Smith, Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1621384292 ISBN 13: 9781621384298

Publisher: Angelico Press, 2019

Synopsis

--The companion volume to the new documentary film featuring the life and thought of Wolfgang Smith, The End of Quantum Reality

Quietly, over the past few decades, mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and mountain climber Wolfgang Smith has published a stunning series of books at the cutting edge of science and metaphysics. Some titles tell the tale: Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief; The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key; Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions: A Critique of Contemporary Scientism; Science and Myth: With a Response to Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design; and Rediscovering the Integral Cosmos: Physics, Metaphysics, and Vertical Causality.

The present book, which appeared in an earlier version as Part I of the last-named, includes arresting new material on the metaphysics of the integral cosmos. Smith accomplishes a magnificent re-integration of the physical sciences into a worldview banished in the West since the Enlightenment yet perfectly accommodative of every legitimate discovery of science. So far from constituting a kind of academic, or nostalgic curiosity, however, that long-forgotten worldview proves to be precisely what is needed to resolve the quandary of the so-called quantum paradox, which has stymied theoretical physicists since the year 1927! The implications of this text, which re-evaluates Einstein's relativism as well as epistemologies falsely based on the Galilean/Cartesian notion of "secondary qualities," restores the ontological realism of the world as we behold it, and opens hitherto inconceivable venues for scientific inquiry. The epochal implications of Smith's work will be brought to light for an expanded audience in a full-length documentary film on his life and thought, The End of Quantum Reality, scheduled for release in early 2019. "One has, in the evening of one's life, the luxury to speak freely," Smith writes, and as never before, so he does.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"This short but remarkably rich work of Wolfgang Smith is a tour de force, summarizing and synthesizing the seminal texts he has written over the past few decades. May this book receive the global attention it deserves."--SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR

"The reader of the present book can expect no less than a study that promises--like its medieval counterparts which opened up the way to present-day mathematical physics--to bear fruit for centuries to come."--RAPHAEL D.M. DE PAOLA

"Prof. Smith's metaphysical reading of the cosmic icon by way of its Euclidean construction is on a par with René Guénon's mathematico-metaphysical texts. It even surpasses these in two ways: first, by enabling us to literally see what falsifies the Einsteinian conception of 'space-time'; and second, by empowering us to comprehend the cosmological teachings concealed in both the Old and New Testaments through the rediscovery of the cosmic trichotomy."--BRUNO BÉRARD

"The importance of this book by physicist and metaphysician Wolfgang Smith lies in the very reasons that will no doubt make it controversial: it challenges certain fundamental features of modern science, namely its epistemological assumptions, its reductive methodologies, and its ideological premises."--M. ALI LAKHANI

"Professor Smith's latest manuscript, taken together with his earlier work, presents a traditional and ontological interpretation of physics with uncommon quality and competence."--ALI SEBETCI

About the Author

Wolfgang Smith was born in Vienna in 1930. At age eighteen he graduated from Cornell University with majors in physics, mathematics, and philosophy. At age twenty he received his Master's degree in theoretical physics from Purdue University, and climbed the Matterhorn.

After contributing to the theoretical solution of the re-entry problem as an aerodynamicist at Bell Aircraft Corporation, Smith earned his doctorate in Mathematics at Columbia University, subsequently embarking upon a 30-year career as a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University.

Despite his impeccable credentials in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, Wolfgang Smith is at heart an outsider not only in regard to these academic disciplines, but more profoundly, in reference to the post-Enlightenment premises of our contemporary world. Finding himself, thus, irreconcilably at odds with the prevailing Zeitgeist, Smith decided to forego a professional career in the fields of his primary interest--i.e., physics and philosophy--in favor of pure mathematics: the one and only academic discipline, he avers, in which "political correctness" can find no foothold. And so he enjoyed the luxury of pursuing a respected university career while being at liberty, as he puts it, "to remain perfectly sane."

It is no wonder, then, that when he finally confronted the so-called quantum enigma, Smith perceived the issue in a very different light than his peers. The problem all along had actually not been "technical"! It was not a question to be resolved by way of differential equations, nor primarily a matter of finding something new--but one of jettisoning an entire Weltanschauung. And for Wolfgang Smith this posed no difficulty: he had in fact done so decades earlier, as can be discerned in his remarkable series of publications.

Wolfgang Smith's life and work are the subject of the documentary film The End of Quantum Reality, scheduled for release in early 2019.

Edition details

• Publisher: Angelico Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1621384292
• ISBN 13: 9781621384298
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 150