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In one of the earliest, and arguably the most eloquent, of the great texts advocating the systematic application of the empirical method, we find these wise words: ?Nor shall we be led to the doctrine of atoms, which implies the hypothesis of a vacuum and that of the unchangeableness of matter (both false assumptions) ...." It is only fitting that at the very outset of the scientific venture the wisest of mankind should have put his finger on what was to prove the most stubborn obstacle (I call it The Fatal Trap) to obtaining a rationally coherent, empirically grounded conception of the world. It is immediately obvious that it presents us with two baffling problems. The first is that it is wholly unable to account for change: the atoms, by definition, are unchanging, and change is totally inapplicable to a vacuum ? itself, as spatially extended nothing, an absurdity, as many of the Greeks, Aristotle among them, saw. The second is that there can exist no causal ground for attractions and repulsions between the atoms across empty space. And the attempt to resolve this by postulating a plenum merely creates further insoluble problems. Fewer than seventy years on saw the publication of Newton's ?Principia' the magnum opus which undoubtedly was to have the greatest single effect on the future course of science. Later, in his ?Opticks? of 1704, Newton left us in no doubt as to his advocacy of the reality of the undifferentiatedly enduring ?billiard ball' atom; but though he saw no objections attaching to the transmission of momentum by impact among atoms, he emphatically rejected action-at-a-distance through a void, such as was inescapably implied by his empirically substantiated theory of gravitation. It is worth noting here that one great physical thinker, Newton's contemporary Gottfried Leibniz, never accepted Newtonian ontological theory, describing space considered as an ontological ultimate, as ?a fancy?. He proposed instead a world-ground composed of ones and zeros, but was never able to develop this idea into a coherent theory.

A new theory of matter, time, space, and their interrelationship is proposed. It is then shown how, from a physical world thus conceived, life inevitably emerges and evolves, in due course giving rise to mind. From this evolutionary process, survival of death and reincarnation are seen to follow as natural consequences.

Science, with lamentable human consequences, has radically misunderstood the universe. An error syndrome built into the foundations of theoretical physics is chiefly responsible. Its eradication leads logically to a universe that is both rational and in accord with our highest aspirations.

To understand the nature of the fate that has befallen physics, it is necessary not only to relate the ?new physics? to its roots in the classical era, but to return to the theoretical roots of classical physics itself. At its very outset, science is confronted with a fundamental dilemma, which it is impossible for it, qua science, satisfactorily to resolve. It is this. In its investigation of the world, science places evidential emphasis overwhelmingly on experience: but not on experience as such. Rather on experience of the world, or the world as experienced. Now, my basic experience of the world, qua world, more especially the core material of physics, the world of interacting bodies in space. is acquired perceptually, via my sense organs. This experience is, of course, part of myself, the perceiver, a consequence of the stimulation of my sense organs by some source, or sources, in the external world. But these sources, ex hypothesi, are external to myself. How, then, can I know what they are? I cannot, in some magical fashion, transcend myself and make a direct comparison of them with the effect which, via my organs of sense, they have upon me. Clearly, if we live in a rational universe, there must be a causal connection between the external source (or noumenon) and the internal effect (or phenomenon). But what is the nature of this connection? R.G. Collingwood defines metaphysics as, " ... the science which deals with the presuppositions underlying ordinary science ..." (An Essay on Metaphysics, p.11); and if it is possible ever satisfactorily to answer the above question then it can only be by a rationally systematic analysis of such presuppositions - that is, by a process of metaphysical reasoning, so defined. But science - ordinary science - has never, as a matter of historical fact, been metaphysically grounded in this sense. In relation to this fundamental dilemma, what position, then, has it taken up?

?The World is my idea ? To have brought this proposition to clear consciousness, and in it the problem of the ideal and the real, i.e. of the world in the head to the world outside the head ? is the distinctive feature of modern philosophy.? Thus Arthur Schopenhauer, a real philosopher, in 1818. On the one hand, then, the world-as-perceived (the phenomenal world); on the other, the-world-in-itself (the noumenal world). Two distinct sets of events: the phenomenal within the head, and the noumenal beyond it. And we can no more understand the noumenal by naively applying to it the categories of the phenomenal than we could find our way around Paris with a London A to Z.

(The title is a pun on ?The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics?, [publ. USA: William Morrows, 1979;UK Rider/Hutchinson, 1979, Fontana Perbacks, 1980]a book by Gary Zukav.)

The profound transmutation undergone by physics in the early years of this century was concomitant with its abrupt awakening from philosophic slumber. Unphilosophic man - the naive realist - believes that the external world closely resembles his perception of it. And the classical physicist, despite certain superficial concessions to subject-object distinctions, remained in all essential respects this naive realist. He really believed that his mechanistic conception, so crudely abstracted from everyday experience, presented a reasonably faithful picture of the physical world. Philosophic man knows better. He knows that while there certainly exists an objective physical reality, those responses to it we call our perceptions are the end-product of an enormously complex, radically constructive, psycho-physiological process; furthermore, that the objectively existing processes which trigger our perceptual responses are often themselves responses triggered initially by our very efforts to perceive the world. So that what the nature of the raw material is at the objective end of this process, he knows we have no means of knowing, unless it be by some equally complex inferential process to which all our empirical knowledge is tributary. And, not through any accession of philosophic wisdom, but because physics had attained that stage of maturity when its discoveries could no longer be accommodated within a naively realistic conceptual framework, the physicist was compelled to recognise as valid this immeasurably more subtle and complex assessment of the true relations existing between observer and observed.