Synopsis
Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality.
But that was just the beginning.
In Beyond Biocentrism, acclaimed biologist Robert Lanza, one of TIME Magazine's "100 Most Influential People in 2014," and leading astronomer Bob Berman, take the reader on an intellectual thrill-ride as they re-examine everything we thought we knew about life, death, the universe, and the nature of reality itself.
The first step is acknowledging that our existing model of reality is looking increasingly creaky in the face of recent scientific discoveries. Science tells us with some precision that the universe is 26.8 percent dark matter, 68.3 percent dark energy, and only 4.9 percent ordinary matter, but must confess that it doesn't really know what dark matter is and knows even less about dark energy. Science is increasingly pointing toward an infinite universe but has no ability to explain what that really means. Concepts such as time, space, and even causality are increasingly being demonstrated as meaningless.
All of science is based on information passing through our consciousness but science hasn't the foggiest idea what consciousness is, and it can't explain the linkage between subatomic states and observation by conscious observers. Science describes life as a random occurrence in a dead universe but has no real understanding of how life began or why the universe appears to be exquisitely designed for the emergence of life.
The biocentrism theory isn't a rejection of science. Quite the opposite. Biocentrism challenges us to fully accept the implications of the latest scientific findings in fields ranging from plant biology and cosmology to quantum entanglement and consciousness.
By listening to what the science is telling us, it becomes increasingly clear that life and consciousness are fundamental to any true understanding of the universe. This forces a fundamental rethinking of everything we thought we knew about life, death, and our place in the universe.
About the Author
Robert Lanza, M.D. Named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People," Lanza is a renowned scientist and author whose peer-reviewed research spans many fields from biology to theoretical physics. He has worked with some of the greatest minds of our time, including Jonas Salk and B.F. Skinner. A U.S. News & World Report cover story called him "the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting" and described him as a "genius," a "renegade thinker," and likened him to Einstein.
Lanza has been pondering the larger existential questions since he was a young boy, exploring the forests of eastern Massachusetts observing nature (like Emerson and Thoreau, who grew up just a few miles from him). This fascination with the nature of life infused his entire career, leading him to the very frontiers of biology and science.
Lanza has also published peer-reviewed papers in theoretical physics, including in Annalen der Physik, which published Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. Lanza's paper takes Einstein's relativity one step further, arguing that time is not only relative to the observer, but that the observer is necessary for the emergence of time itself. Lanza also published a paper in JCAP, one of the leading journals in cosmology and astrophysics, which he co-authored with theoretical physicists, Podolskiy and Barvinsky (one of the world's leading theorists in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology). This paper shows that networks of observers define the structure of physical reality/spacetime itself.
Dr. Lanza and his research have been featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including all the major television networks, CNN, Time, and the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, among others.
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