The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science

The enthusiastic blurbs accompanying the galley of Laszlo's (The Inner Limits of Mankind) new book carry some high-profile signatures from the New Age crowd, Larry Dossey, Edgar Mitchell, Thomas Berry and Yehudi Menuhin among them. The praise is justified; among the many new science titles available today--books that synthesize cutting-edge thought in various scientific disciplines while adding their own interpretations of a holistic, creative universe--Laszlo's stands out. In it, the author, focusing on physics, not only reviews the work of farsighted thinkers including Bohm and Heisenberg, but makes his own contribution. Laszlo postulates a fifth universal field to unify the accepted four universal fields in physics: gravitation, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Laszlo speculates that a fifth field, which he calls the psi field, would explain diverse anomalies from the conundrums of quantum physics and sudden leaps in complexity during biological evolution to human consciousness and even ESP. He likens the psi field to the Vedic Brahman, ""the unchanging mind and essence of the universe,"" and describes it as a ""subtly interconnected world, a `whispering pond' in which we are intimately linked to each other and to nature, assimilated by our intellect and embraced by our heart."" Readers of Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake, among others, will relish Laszlo's erudite analysis of current advances in science as well as his bold and inspiring vision of a possible future science. Author tour. (Nov.)