ABSTRACT
The book you are holding is about the way we view the world. 1 It is about the way we understand reality: the world we live in, our place in it and the universe around us. 2 The way we view our world is changing. There is a perceivable shift in the way people (both scientists and non-scientists) think about it. Furthermore, this is a necessary and timely shift. Our modern understanding of reality dates back to the work of Descartes, Newton and their contemporaries, some 350 years ago. It is the backbone of modern-day, Western society and it has been a manifestly successful way to understand the world around us, bringing us science, industry and the Enlightenment, leading to spectacular increases in wealth worldwide, allowing culture and society to flourish. However, there are areas where our current scientific world view falters. There are phenomena that it cannot explain, as we will see further on. The premise of this book is that there is a shift occurring in the way we understand reality, precisely because our current world view is reaching its limits. People are beginning to understand the world and themselves as interconnected, rather than as individual entities bound together only by cause and effect. The goal of this book is to sketch a picture of what this new, connected world view might look like. First though, let us explain what the authors, Sarah & Ton, mean by ‘our current world view’.
