Quietly, over the past few decades, mathematician, physicist,
philosopher, and mountain climber Wolfgang Smith has published a
stunning series of books at the cutting edge of science and metaphysics.
Some titles tell the tale: Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief; The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key; Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions: A Critique of Contemporary Scientism; Science and Myth: With a Response to Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design; and Rediscovering the Integral Cosmos: Physics, Metaphysics, and Vertical Causality.
The present book, which appeared in an earlier version as Part I of
the last-named, includes arresting new material on the metaphysics of
the integral cosmos. Smith accomplishes a magnificent re-integration of
the physical sciences with a worldview banished in the West since the
Enlightenment yet perfectly accommodative of every legitimate discovery
of science. So far from constituting a kind of academic, or nostalgic
curiosity, however, that long-forgotten worldview proves to be precisely what
is needed to resolve the quandary of the so-called quantum paradox,
which has stymied theoretical physicists since the year 1927! The
implications of this text, which re-evaluates Einstein’s relativism as
well as epistemologies falsely based on the Galilean/Cartesian notion of
“secondary qualities,” restores the ontological realism of the world as
we behold it, and opens hitherto inconceivable venues for scientific
inquiry.
The epochal ramifications of Smith’s work will be brought to
light for an expanded audience in a full-length documentary film on his
life and thought, The End of Quantum Reality, scheduled for
release in 2019. “One has, in the evening of one’s life, the
luxury to speak freely,” Smith writes, and as never before, so he does.