HAND IN GLOVE - HANDING LOVE

An attempt to combine ancient spiritual wisdom and modern physics into a coherent view of the universe. 

Debut author VS boldly adopts the grandest of aspirations—to explain the totality of what is. The author begins by calling into question the correspondence between reality and the limited scope of empirical observation, and he suggests that there is at least the possibility of a nontemporal fifth dimension that cannot be detected by ordinary perception. Within that dimension—which he sometimes describes as somehow existing within us—there is a waterlike substance made up of particles that could be described as “gravitons.” Through various physical processes, the universe as we know it developed out of this substance—what the author names “Ocean D.” Gravity, the “dominant force of the universe,” therefore is “nothing but the buoyancy of celestial bodies on Ocean D.” Furthermore, VS argues that consciousness itself is a fundamental building block of the cosmos and ubiquitously distributed among all things. Finally, this permits a collapsing of the self into the cosmos, creating a monistic unity between the self and the universe. The moral implication is that the universe is potentially structured around a karmic causality and that we can transcend our experience of perceptual duality to achieve oneness with all things. VS provides a panoramic synopsis of the history of thought on gravity, not only discussing Western scientific luminaries like Isaac Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus, but also precursors to them like the ancient Persian mathematician Mohammed Al-Khwarizmi. The author’s scientific objectives are impressively lofty, nothing short of reconciling the contradictory worlds of quantum mechanics and general relativity. VS’s proposals, however, are unrestrainedly speculative, the products of a fertile imagination unfortunately combined with a dismissal of empirical evidence. Also, the book is confusingly incondite, prone to digressive meandering. Finally, the author’s philosophical ingenuity is often undermined by ill-disciplined prose: “All matter formed through the process of vacuum evaporation and desublimation from the boiling of Ocean D as the vacuum pressure increases within the bubble, embodies in reality nothing but projections of the Ocean D from the fifth dimension into our four-dimensional bubble universe.”

A remarkably inventive but less than rigorous cosmological exploration.