The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science

One of the core questions our culture faces these days is how to understand ourselves within the context of the universe in which we live. The need is for a model which integrates our growing knowledge of our potentials as conscious subjects with what we are coming to know of the objective world. In both areas, the subjective and the objective, there is growing evidence of subtle interconnections among what we have long taken to be separate.Laszlo provides an excelent and very readable, non technical, survey of the state of our research knowledge in the areas of the cosmos, of matter, of life and of the mind. He clearly guides us through the paradoxes which appear in this research and shows that many of them may be resolvable if we have some subtle connection among items by which information can be transmitted which is not limited by the currently accepted constraints of time and space. He shows how a fifth fundamental energy field, the zero energy field of the quantum vacuum, now being studied by some physicists can provide the means for establishing such subtle connections and reviews some of the leading edge research in this area. What especially recommends this book is the combination of thorough understanding of the science involved with a basically humanistic viewpoint that Laszlo (himself a leading philosopher of science and major contributor to systems theory) brings to this account.