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Community for Spirit
Physical Sciences
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Fritjof Capra once said "At the rate we're going,
physics will prove spirituality", which is another way of talking
about the "spiritual" determining the physical. Here are a few
books that describe what he meant.
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Turning Point - Fritjof Capra
 | A physicist, Capra discusses the implications of modern physics for our very
view of what reality is. He details the breakdown of Descartes'
and Newton's mechanical model and its gradual replacement with a
holistic, interdependent view of reality. He sees spontaneous
growth of a "systems view of life" occurring in all
fields, from economics to psychology.
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| The
Life of the Cosmos- Lee Smolin
| A physics professor, Smolin presents a complex, self-organized
universe in which life is a natural part of a much bigger picture.
Moving comfortably from atoms to the possibility of multiple
universes, he presents an integrative view of physical reality.
"...how does one search, not for new answers, but for new
questions?" he asks. If we can look at it in a new way,
"our familiar world can all of a sudden reveal new
meaning."
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| At
Home in the Universe - Stuart Kauffman
| A biologist, Kauffman discusses the natural, spontaneous
creation of order that is life. He writes, "...life is not
located in the property of any single molecule -- in the details
-- but is a collective property of systems of interacting
molecules." Life consists of continuous adaptation, and its
natural place is always at the border between order and chaos.
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| Consilience:
The Unity of Knowledge - Edward O. Wilson
| A professor of biology, Wilson moves across all academic
disciplines to demonstrate a common thread of natural laws. He
"argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the
need to search for consilience -- the proof that everything in our
world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental
natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch
of learning."
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| Full
House - Stephen Jay Gould
| A paleobiologist fascinated with evolution, Stephen Jay Gould
writes, "...evolution is a copiously branching bush with
innumerable present outcomes, not a highway or a ladder with one
summit." "Variation," he says, "is the primary
expression of natural reality." With delightful examples, he
shows how our assumptions of linearity and progress lead us to
miscreate and misread quantitative information.
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| Metapatterns
- Tyler Volk
| Volk, a truly Renaissance person, may be found doing anything
from teaching architecture, in which he holds a degree, to earth
sciences, in which he holds a doctorate. Metapatterns is about the
simple yet universal shapes of nature - spheres, tubes, binaries,
and arrows - and their unique versatility in performing the jobs
for which nature selects them. He takes these patterns across both
space and time, to describe the wonder that comes from the
combination of these patterns into the indivisible wholes of life.
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| How
Nature Works - Per Bak
| Bak's work deals specifically with the "science of
self-organized criticality". He argues that large systems
with many components have a "tendency to evolve into a poised
'critical' state, way out of balance, where minor disturbances may
lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes." His
metaphor of the sandpile - perfectly stable, and then, when one
additional grain of sand is added, becoming an avalanche of
falling sand - has been used repeatedly by others to explain the
apparently sudden collapse of what were assumed to be stable
systems, natural or manmade. These normative systems, Bak would
say, piled on just one too many grains of sand. |
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