Indeed, monism later evolved into a trademark of his school, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus ( c205- 270 CE) wrote about ‘the one’ that is ‘all things’ and ‘being’s generator’. And Plato, arguably the most influential philosopher ever, is said to have taught monism as a secret doctrine at his academy, to be disseminated only orally. Heraclitus’ contemporary Parmenides ( c520- 460 BCE) believed in reality as a timeless ‘one, that is and that is not not to be’. Philosophers in the school of Pythagoras ( c570- 490 BCE), renowned for his alleged discovery of the geometrical relation among the three sides of a right triangle, identified the number one as the centre of the Universe. In ancient times, the concept of monism held more weight in the popular mind. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Covering over four decades of thematic development, this book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in quantum field theory, gravitation and cosmology.‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. It explores the self-consistent description of both space-time and matter via the semiclassical Einstein equation of semiclassical gravity theory, exemplified by the inflationary cosmology, and fluctuations of quantum fields which underpin stochastic gravity, necessary for the description of metric fluctuations (space-time foams). This book examines the effects of quantum field processes back-reacting on the background space-time which become important near the Planck time (10-43 sec). Combining the two yields quantum field theory in curved space-time, which is needed to understand quantum field processes in the early universe and black holes, such as the well-known Hawking effect. The two pillars of modern physics are general relativity and quantum field theory, the former describes the large scale structure and dynamics of space-time, the latter, the microscopic constituents of matter.
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