Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Berman, Bob, Lanza, Robert

ISBN 10: 1933771690 / ISBN 13: 9781933771694

Published by BenBella Books, 2009

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Synopsis:

Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.

Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are ...
Publisher: BenBella Books
Publication Date: 2009
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good