BASIC POINTS

This first chapter outlines the rapid progress science has made from the Renaissance to the present.  In the course of this evolution, what stands out most are the four forces that move and keep the universe as we know it together and the growing necessity to be able to describe these forces in a unified way.

The chapter begins with Newton’s groundbreaking unification of the heavens and the earth.   In fact, this discovery was fuelled by changes that had begun to take place two hundred years earlier.  It was the product of the scientific advances made by such men as Leonardo da Vinci, considered the Renaissance man par excellence;  Copernicus, the first scientist to describe a heliocentric system; and Tyco Brahe, whose precise astronomical observations would later be useful to Johannes Kepler when putting forward his laws concerning the movement of the planets.  All of these men were influential in Newton’s formulation of the principles describing the law of universal gravitation, or gravity.  Also crucial for the period were Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon, both of whom contributed significantly to establishing the modern scientific method. 

After Newton, James Clerk Maxwell took things a step further by unifying electricity and magnetism in a series of equations.  In addition to this, Maxwell contributed so many other things to science that Albert Einstein once described his work as the “most profound and profitable contribution to physics since Newton.” 

The third element in the chapter centers on the unification of the three dimensions of space (long, wide and tall) and time.  With his new theories of gravity, Albert Einstein helped us to understand the universe as a single continuous fabric, or space-time.  Despite his revolutionary contributions to science, however, Einstein was unable to unify the remaining known forces with his new theories of gravity due to the lack of information available at the time.   This information, which became available to Western science slightly before the middle of the twentieth century, is the foundation of the revolution taking place in science today.

Finally, the chapter explains how the discovery of subatomic matter, beyond protons, neutrons and electrons, revealed another level of physics, which until then had been invisible.  Moreover, we learned about the two remaining natural forces: strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.  The work of quantum mechanics would begin to explain the behavior of these incredibly small wave-particles.  

 As we delve deeper into matter, nature does not reveal any kind of “foundational blocks,” as Newtonian physics suggested it would.  The search for the building blocks of matter had to be abandoned when physicists encountered a large number of elemental particles that could barely be described as material bodies.  As a result of experiments carried out over the last few decades, physicists have discovered that matter is absolutely mutable and that, at the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty in definite places but rather seems to have a “tendency” to exist.  All particles have the capacity to transform into other particles. They can be created out of energy and convert into other particles; or they can be created out of energy and vanish, returning to an energy state.  While we are unable to say when and how this happens, we know that it occurs continuously.  At the personal level, as we penetrate the realms of modern psychology and spiritual development, we discover that the old disjunctive forms also dissolve in the duality of the one and the other.  No longer are we simply good or bad; we do not limit ourselves to loving or hating someone but  find a much wider range of capacities within ourselves.  We can feel love and hate, along with all the intermediate emotions, for the same person.  We act responsibly.  We view how the antiquated dichotomy God/Devil dissolves into a totality in which the interior God/Goddess fuses with the exterior God/Goddess.  Evil is not the opposite of God/Goddess, but rather resistance to the force of God/Goddess.  Everything consists of the same energy.  The force of God/Goddess is simultaneously black and white, masculine and feminine; it contains both white light and black emptiness.      

As the reader can see, while we continue to use concepts pervaded with dualism, we live in world of “apparent” and complementary opposites, which is to say not “real” opposites.  In this system, dualism is used to propel us toward the interior of unity. (Fragment from the book “Hands of Light” by Barbara Brennan)  

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