Our Living Universe
introducing a new book and looking for beta-editors
Our Universe ... but not as we know it
Centuries ago, astrologers presumed that the ground they stood on lay at the centre of the cosmos. This unconscious belief drove them to build increasingly complex depictions for the movement of objects in the heavens. But in 1543, a polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, challenged his contemporaries’ theories with a new astronomical model – the heliocentric theory – that the earth revolves around the sun. This new frame of reference enabled a far simpler explanation for planetary movements and began to open our eyes to the vastness of the universe.
Jumping to modern times, the scientific community is still creating complicated descriptions of nature to explain our observations – theorising about all manner of forces which bind matter together, imagining multiple dimensions, or speculating about undetectable forms of Dark Matter. But by changing our perspective, I propose a far simpler understanding of the reality that we experience, including why life happens.
The current scientific approach produces an artificial separation between our main fields of science – physical, life and social. There is no particular reason why they should be so siloed. If we accept that human beings are a natural part of the universe – in that we are a consequence of Darwin’s theory of evolution and we are made from atoms – then philosophically there should be a common thread connecting our different sciences. But there isn’t.
This book follows an intellectual journey to discover the universal evolutionary processes that created our cosmos and everything therein. The starting point is to appreciate ourselves better and from this we can formulate a new approach for the rest of nature. What emerges is a universal theory – a theory of everything – that links them all together.
For the social sciences, a new theory of human development is deduced, revealing how human society evolves as each one of us seeks to satisfy our own survival needs through competitive and cooperative interaction with others. Characteristic types of interaction give rise to macroscopic social processes. From this, the full complexity of modern humanity can be seen to emerge, predicting with remarkable accuracy the social, economic, and cultural world that we see around us.
Turning to the life sciences, ever since Darwin published his incredible theory, it has contained a gaping hole – the inability to explain properly why cooperation happens in nature and thence human society. Building on the construct already developed for the human sphere, this book completes Darwin’s theory, clarifying how identifiable types of competition and cooperation occur in the natural kingdom giving rise to the processes that drive the evolution of organisms and ecosystems, ultimately leading to human beings and civilisation. The reason for cooperation in nature is remarkably straightforward.
For the physical sciences, I challenge our current scientific paradigm that our universe is made up of inanimate matter impelled by fields and forces. Instead, I suggest a differing viewpoint that all matter systems spontaneously respond to their energetic environments. This alternative perspective matches our observations of the physical world and modern thinking in quantum mechanics but paves the way to a view of the universe that can be unified with our other observations of nature – the social and life sciences. Ultimately this new perspective provides a far more consistent understanding of the material cosmos and further provides a simple explanation for wave-particle duality.
​
Through this exploration of our fields of science, there emerges a new paradigm – a universal theory of evolution – that transcends everything that we experience and all our observations of the universe around us.
Proposal
This book turns existing thinking upside down in many areas of current science and provides provocative solutions to many puzzles that we have yet to resolve. Of key importance, I provide a way to understand the development of human society, transcending economics, sociology, social psychology, and psychology. As we face the challenges of global warming and the destruction of our fisheries and rainforests, human society needs to adapt, but we collectively have little idea how, other than turning to technology as the only panacea. If we can understand better how civilisation naturally changes over time, we can influence our own evolution to respond empathetically to the pressing global challenges we face.
But to achieve this objective, we have to change the way we look at everything – a completely new paradigm for our scientific endeavours.
Background
This book emerged as the unintended consequence of doctoral research undertaken some twenty-five years ago, seeking to explore the concept of sustainable development. I deduced that the notion of ‘sustainable’ was easy to understand. It can be readily explained through our existing physical sciences. However, it also became apparent that unless we have a better understanding of what human development means, we will always struggle to persuade society at large to adapt so that we can survive the challenges ahead. A model first developed within the human sphere turned out to be applicable to other areas of our experience – the natural and physical worlds – providing insight into the underlying processes that cause the evolution of all things.
​
Potential
This book could be a game-changer, perhaps issuing a re-write of many of our academic textbooks across the social, life and physical sciences. It’s a reinvention of how we see ourselves and the universe in which we exist. Whilst the ideas are consistent with our collective scientific observations of the social, natural, and physical worlds, the entire picture created is novel and it provides provocative solutions to enigma that have plagued our sciences for hundreds of years.
Who might be interested?
Many books seek to explain quandaries that our sciences struggle to resolve. They rely on extant theories and fail to provide any new answers. It’s time to look for something different, another way to understand things. This book is not some rehearsal of existing science or another slant at, say, quantum mechanics. It constructs a whole new philosophical frame of reference for why the universe is as it is and why evolution has ultimately led me to write this book. It provides intriguing solutions to some of our most perplexing conundrums, such as why cooperation happens in nature and wave-particle duality.
This book has been written for the mass market – from teenagers upwards – for those keen to hear about new areas of scientific thought. I seek to avoid jargon and explain things in simple terms, building up a new construct for our reality in an interesting and provocative way.