Books

The Relativity of All Things

Beyond Spacetime

Laurent Nottale

Translated into English for the first time, this brilliant French bestseller by eminent astrophysicist Laurent Nottale presents the theory of scale relativity, which offers a framework for the unification of quantum theory and relativity through fractal geometry. Updated and revised, with a new afterword by philosopher of science Charles Alunni, The Relativity of All Things is the first of Nottale’s popularly accessible works available to English-language readers.

Laurent Nottale is a former Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a visiting researcher at the Paris Observatory. His technical works which have been translated into English include Scale Relativity and Fractal Space-Time and Fractal Space-Time and Microphysics.

“To describe the ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics without a single mathematical formula is a veritable feat of magic. . . . With a philosophical audacity that only non-philosophers can possess Nottale finds that the essence of the principle of relativity is in fact the affirmation of the existence of universal laws applied at every scale. . . . His task is enormous. He proposes that the theory of relativity and that of quantum mechanics, with the radical schism between their findings and methods of thinking, can be reconciled. . . . Nottale’s methodological innovation is truly revolutionary. To bring it to fruition, he weds the mathematics of fractals with the theory of relativity. . . . Nottale’s approach shows us that we are far from the ‘end of science’: we are perhaps only at its recommencement.”

Basarab Nicolescu, Business Digest

“Einstein had himself explicitly imagined that a realistic approach to the quantum problem could follow the introduction of nondifferentiability into physics. In 1948, he wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli: ‘Perhaps someone will discover another possibility, if they look with enough perseverance.’ Laurent Nottale is precisely this ‘someone’! Read and study this marvelous theory, allow yourself to be moved by its beauty, its depth, and its major experimental implications, which are nothing less than fundamental for the future of science and for philosophy.”

Charles Alunni, Director, Philosophy of Science, École Normale Supérieure

“Since the birth of quantum theory, physicists have been challenged with the development of a unified theory of quantum mechanics and relativity, with no general consensus on the best way forward. To progress further, we have to confront deep questions about space and time, quantum theory, and cosmology, which take theory back into contact with experiment. The theory of scale relativity offers . . . a serious contribution to the debate on unification, offering an intuitive insight into how these theories could be fundamentally linked through space-time geometry.”

Philip Turner, Director, Centre for Plant Science and Biopolymer Research, Edinburgh Napier University

“Laurent Nottale proposes that we look at the concept of fractals to make relativity, extended further yet, the fundamental principle on which to base quantum mechanics. After the relativity of time and space, he has tackled the relativity of scale, putting into question much of what we thought we knew.”

Pierre Bonnaure, Futuribles

“Einstein taught us that spacetime is curved. Laurent Nottale, the inventor of scale relativity, advances the proposition that it is fractal. . . . While the spacetime considered by Galileo or Einstein keeps its smooth structure whatever the scale, his reveals new roughness at each change of resolution, a hypothesis with radical consequences.”

Science & Vie

“Developments in geometry have often enabled progress in physics, especially when concerning relativity. Non-Euclidean geometry, geometrical systems where the plane is a sphere, made it possible for Einstein to devise his theory of curved space. Today, a new geometry, fractal geometry, allows us to propose a theory of fractal space.”

Idées clés, by Business Digest

 

Psyche and Singularity

Jungian Psychology and Holographic String Theory

Timothy Desmond

“The most original and important contribution to the integration of Jungian psychology and physics since the original collaboration between Jung and Pauli.”

Sean Kelly, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies

“Timothy Desmond’s theory that the psyche is a gravitational singularity would drive both Isaac Newton and Sigmund Freud crazy. But any theory that doesn’t is a waste of time. Desmond articulates a vision that just might be wild enough to take us home.”

Brian Thomas Swimme, Author of Journey of the Universe

“Psyche and Singularity is one of the most profoundly significant books I’ve had the pleasure to read.  Tracing striking parallels between string theory and Jungian thought, Desmond provides the most compelling explanation for how synchronicities work that I’ve encountered.”

Grant Maxwell, Author of The Dynamics of Transformation: Tracing an Emerging World View

“The discussion may sound like insane science fiction, but Desmond offers a refreshingly accurate picture, a synthesis of psyche and quantum physics that becomes the key to unlock a map of consciousness and synchronicity backed by the central ideas of Pauli, Susskind, and Jung.”

Shelli Joye, Author of Tuning the Mind: Holonomic Brain Theory and the Implicate Order

According to Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind, our three-dimensional universe is essentially a holographic “movie,” an illusion projected by one-dimensional threads of energy from the spherical horizon of the cosmos, where the past, present, and future are eternally superimposed. Psyche and Singularity shows how Susskind’s string theory of holographic information conservation corroborates some of psychologist Carl Jung’s most profound ideas.

Timothy Desmond suggests that Susskind’s inside-out black hole model of the universe forms a geometrically perfect mandala: a central singularity encompassed by a two-dimensional sphere which serves as a universal memory bank. In precise fulfillment of Jung’s theory about the unifying quality of the mandala image as the “archetype of wholeness,” Susskind’s model of the universe reconciles the notoriously incommensurable paradigms of general relativity and quantum mechanics, providing a mathematically plausible explanation for Jung’s near-death experience of his past, present, and future life simultaneously at the cosmic horizon. Susskind’s theory also provides a plausible cosmological model to explain Jung’s theory of synchronicity— meaningful coincidences may be tied together by strings at the cosmic horizon, from which they radiate inward.

 

The Dynamics of Transformation

Tracing an Emerging World View

Grant Maxwell

“Remarkable and nearly unique in its mastery and scope.”

Allan Combs, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Asheville

“An inspiring vision.”

Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

“By the time one reaches the end of the argument, one has the sense of having undergone a kind of initiation into an ever-widening community of seekers for whom value and meaning, pattern and purpose are the real stuff of which worlds are made.”

Sean Kelly, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies

“Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said I would only believe in a god who knows how to dance; Maxwell traces out those dance steps, which he calls the dynamics of transformation.”

 Timothy Desmond, author of Psyche and Singularity

“An important and insightful contribution to understanding the creative transition into a new paradigm of intellectual thought.”

Keiron Le Grice, Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute

In the tradition of books like William James’ Pragmatism, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, The Dynamics of Transformation is a concise and clear presentation of a radically novel theory with the potential to transform the reader’s view of the world. The book offers twelve concepts that trace the contours of an emerging world view after the postmodern. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists, from Hegel, Carl Jung, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead to Jean Gebser, Richard Tarnas, Ray Kurzweil, and Terence McKenna, it provides a framework for understanding how processes change over time. Synthesizing ideas ranging from quantum discontinuity, fractals, and archetypes to qualitative time, teleology, and exponential acceleration, Maxwell shows how these concepts relate to one another in a complexly intertwined network. He suggests that these theoretical approaches are all confluent streams that have gradually been converging over the last few centuries, and that this increasingly potent conceptual flood appears primed for a dramatic entrance into the preeminent currents of academic and intellectual culture.

 

Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, Issue 6

Cultural Awakenings

Edited by Grant Maxwell

We appear to be undergoing a collective psychological and cultural death-and-rebirth initiation on an unprecedented scale, and of unique historical significance. The Uranus-Pluto square, in orb from 2007 to 2020, is correlating with unexpected and deeply disruptive changes in many spheres, but it is also providing a rare opportunity to overcome these pervasive crises to usher our cultures into a new world view that is more just, compassionate, mindful, and sustainable than the apparent dead-end to which the habitual assumptions of late modernity, once so productive and inspired, have led us. The articles included in this issue of Archai are profoundly optimistic, showing possible ways forward in both the cultural and theoretical domains, perhaps especially correlating with an alignment of Jupiter, the planetary archetype of expansive, optimistic elevation, in a T-square with Uranus and Pluto from late 2016 through mid-2018. The contributors–including Richard Tarnas, Becca Tarnas, Kent Bye, and Michele Maynard–write about subjects ranging from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Aristotelian causation, Jean Gebser’s concretion of time hypothesis, and Ray Kurzweil’s theory of exponential technology to virtual reality, Marilyn Manson, the hip hop movement, and sustainability. This issue looks beyond our moment of crisis to new directions for the theory and practice of culture, suggesting the many ways archetypal cosmology can play a significant role in the transformation in which we are collectively engaged, providing orienting purpose, cosmic intelligibility, and a capacity for greater awareness of the qualitative dynamics informing our experience, at once liberating, heartening, and illuminating.

 

Beyond Plato’s Cave

The Philosophy Club – Book One

Grant Maxwell

“Ethan had a strange sense that there was something important in that cave, something that tickled the back of his mind like a forgotten dream.”

Ethan Whitehead knows he’s supposed to be nervous on his first day of eighth grade, but he’s mostly excited to be reunited with his best friend, Nick. Nick’s dad is the billionaire inventor of the world’s top Virtual Reality system, and he’s created a new technology that makes you feel like you’re really in the virtual world. The boys meet two girls in philosophy class, and they become the first kids to try the SPECS. They’re amazing! But then Ethan starts seeing a mysterious glowing blue cave, and he feels a strong urge to go inside. Beyond the cave lies an adventure they never could have imagined!

 

Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, Issue 5

Saturn and the Theoretical Foundations of an Emerging Discipline

Edited by Grant Maxwell and Becca Tarnas

Saturn structures the rites of passage and initiations of life: at the precise time of birth Saturn fixes the natal chart, and it stands at the threshold of death. James Hillman’s essay “On Senex Consciousness” provides the foundation for this issue of the Archai journal: it is an homage to the Saturn archetype, forming the backbone for the entire volume. The contributors—including Richard Tarnas, Keiron Le Grice, Jessica Garfield-Kabbara, and Drew Dellinger—offer articles on such subjects as the potential for a feminine re-visioning of Saturn, a philosophical investigation into the three modalities of time, the relation between psychological and archetypal complexes, the connection between participatory theory and archetypal cosmology, a review of Sean Kelly’s book Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era, and archetypal analyses of Dante’s Saturn return, the Saturn-Neptune complex in the life and works of Virginia Woolf, and the relation between karma, collective field dynamics, and the Saturn-Pluto complex.

 

How Does It Feel?

Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Philosophy of Rock and Roll

Grant Maxwell

“Grant Maxwell examines the recorded music of popular culture with the same subtlety and care as he brings to the literary and philosophical texts of high culture. He seeks not just breadth of knowledge but coherence of insight; not just accumulation of knowledge but depth of understanding.”

Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

How Does It Feel? traces the significance of rock and roll through the early careers of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan, drawing on some of the most profound philosophical ideas of the last few centuries. Through the artists’ own words and intimate accounts, the book suggests that archaic modes of thought, including those associated with mysticism, alchemy, shamanism, and ecstatic spiritual practice, and even with often trivialized phenomena described by words like “magic,” “destiny,” and “prophecy,” are vitally important for understanding how these musicians were able to catalyze the inception of an epochal revolution in human consciousness.

From the recording of Presley’s first hit at Sun studio to the Beatles’ primal Hamburg initiation to Dylan’s “transfiguration,” Maxwell shows how rock and roll has enacted the return of relational modes repressed since Descartes’ equation of thought with human being in the seventeenth century. Although the privileging of rationality, materialism, and science has apparently been in service to the development of humanity’s intellectual capacities, this “ascent of man” has come at the expense of intuitive, affective, and embodied ways of knowing.

However, nothing can be repressed forever, and rock and roll appears to have been a compensatory reaction to the modern rationalization and disenchantment of culture. Through an engaging retelling of the familiar narratives from a novel philosophical perspective, How Does It Feel? illuminates how the renewed attention to bodily experience performed by these musicians has opened the door to even more deeply repressed premodern modes, mediating what appears to be the emergence of a new world view that integrates modern and premodern premises.

 

The Walk

Written by Grant Maxwell

Illustrations by Susan Edwards

“The Walk is one of those special children’s books that you will enjoy reading just as your little one will love hearing the comforting words and seeing the wonderful illustrations over and over again.”

Grand Magazine

The Walk is an illustrated book that helps children fall asleep and have sweet dreams. Grant Maxwell developed the story night after night as he put his son, Mason, to bed. Realizing he had created a story that other people might enjoy, Grant enlisted his mother-in-law, artist Susan Edwards, to paint the beautiful illustrations. In the story, a little boy named Mason and his dogs, Muffin and Lloyd, decide to go for a walk in the woods. They find a cave that leads down to a great cavern with an underground lake. At the edge of the lake, they find a rowboat and row out into the center of the lake, where they find an island with a little tower. They climb the stairs and, at the top, they find a little room…

After finding a broad readership in the United States, The Walk has been translated into Portuguese by HarperCollins Brazil.

 

Alphabet Snakes

Around the World

Written by Grant Maxwell

Illustrated by Susan Edwards

Alphabet Snakes teaches children the alphabet while introducing them to stories and myths of snakes and serpents from around the world. From Eve and Thor to Quetzalcoatl and Medusa, readers are carried along by the clever rhymes and beautiful illustrations from Ancient Egypt to an American snake farm, from the depths of the oceans to the heavenly heights, and through the cultural and religious traditions of India, Haiti, Europe, Africa, China, the Middle East, and the Americas. A book for children who are curious about other places and other times, Alphabet Snakes is a fun and informative addition to any family’s collection.