Re-reading Michael Talbot

Re-reading Michael Talbot – (Can’t believe it’s 3 weeks since I last posted – been so busy with the day job recently – anyway ….)

I’ve re-read Michael Talbot’s “Mysticism and the New Physics” in the last few days – it’s only 130 pages plus afterwords. This was the first book I read that explicitly linked the two concepts in its title. He completed writing it before Capra’s “Tao of Physics” in 1976 (which I’ve not read yet), but didn’t get it published until 1981. Apart from a survey of all things “out-of-body”, Zen and Tantric, it builds on John Wheeler’s (Princeton) work on the philosophical consequences of Quantum Physics. It remains an amazing eye-opener – the book that led me to realise perhaps I really should read Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – the rest is history, though the two books couldn’t be more different.

One thing that I didn’t realise first time round, and as a result I owe the British Computer Society Quantum Computing group an apology, was the significance of Holography / Holochory. [See here] [and here] When I first read M&NP, I took Talbot’s reference to the world “out there” being a hologram, ripples of interference in the ether or quantum foam, as being purely metaphorical. Of course the BCS is majoring on Holochory as a fundamental physics behind information and consciousness.

The other thing I didn’t notice was the reference to Brian Josephson (Cambridge Physics Nobel Laureate – whose work I’ve blogged about many times, corresponded with and briefly met earlier this year [See here] [and here]), amongst many other impressive references from the world of physics.

(Oh yeah, and only yesterday Steve Coppell was eventually named as Alan Pardew’s successor at Reading FC.)