Quietly, over the past few decades, mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and mountain climber Wolfgang Smith has published a stunning series of books at the cutting edge of science and metaphysics. Some titles tell the tale: Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief; The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key; Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions: A Critique of Contemporary Scientism; Science and Myth: With a Response to Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design; and Rediscovering the Integral Cosmos: Physics, Metaphysics, and Vertical Causality.

The present book, which appeared in an earlier version as Part I of the last-named, includes arresting new material on the metaphysics of the integral cosmos. Smith accomplishes a magnificent re-integration of the physical sciences into a worldview banished in the West since the Enlightenment yet perfectly accommodative of every legitimate discovery of science. So far from constituting a kind of academic, or nostalgic curiosity, however, that long-forgotten worldview proves to be precisely what is needed to resolve the quandary of the so-called quantum paradox, which has stymied theoretical physicists since the year 1927! The implications of this text, which re-evaluates Einstein’s relativism as well as epistemologies falsely based on the Galilean/Cartesian notion of “secondary qualities,” restores the ontological realism of the world as we behold it, and—perhaps most shockingly—restores geocentrism as well, in its profoundest sense. The epochal implications of Smith’s work will be brought to light for an expanded audience in a full-length documentary film on his life and thought, The End of Quantum Reality, scheduled for release in early 2019. “One has, in the evening of one’s life, the luxury to speak freely,” Smith writes, and as never before, so he does.

“This short but remarkably rich work of Wolfgang Smith is a tour de force, summarizing and synthesizing the seminal texts he has written over the past few decades. May this book receive the global attention it deserves.”—SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR

“The reader of the present book can expect no less than a study that promises—like its medieval counterparts which opened up the way to present-day mathematical physics—to bear fruit for centuries to come.”—RAPHAEL D.M. DE PAOLA

“Prof. Smith’s metaphysical reading of the cosmic icon by way of its Euclidean construction is on a par with René Guénon’s mathematico-metaphysical texts. It even surpasses these in two ways: first, by enabling us to literally see what falsifies the Einsteinian conception of ‘space-time’; and second, by empowering us to comprehend the cosmological teachings concealed in both the Old and New Testaments through the rediscovery of the cosmic trichotomy.”—BRUNO BÉRARD

“The importance of this book by physicist and metaphysician Wolfgang Smith lies in the very reasons that will no doubt make it controversial: it challenges certain fundamental features of modern science, namely its epistemological assumptions, its reductive methodologies, and its ideological premises.”—M. ALI LAKHANI

“Professor Smith’s latest manuscript, taken together with his earlier work, presents a traditional and ontological interpretation of physics with uncommon quality and competence.”—ALI SEBETCI

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About the Author

Wolfgang Smith was born in Vienna in 1930. At age eighteen he graduated from Cornell University with majors in physics, mathematics, and philosophy. At age twenty he received his Master's degree in theoretical physics from Purdue University, and climbed the Matterhorn. After contributing to the theoretical solution of the re-entry problem as an aerodynamicist at Bell Aircraft Corporation, Smith earned his doctorate in Mathematics at Columbia University, subsequently embarking upon a 30-year career as a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University. Above all, however, it needs to be realized that despite his impeccable credentials in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, Wolfgang Smith is at heart an outsider not only in regard to these academic disciplines, but more profoundly, in reference to the post-Enlightenment premises of our contemporary world. Early in life he became deeply attracted to the Platonist and Neoplatonist schools, and subsequently undertook extensive sojourns in India and the Himalayan regions to contact such vestiges of ancient tradition as still could be found. And one of the basic lessons he learned by way of these encounters is that there actually exist higher sciences in which man himself plays the part not merely of the observer, but of the "scientific instrument" becomes himself, in other words, the "microscope" or "telescope" by which he is enabled to perceive hitherto invisible reaches of the integral cosmos. By the same token, moreover, Smith came to recognize the stringent limitations to which our contemporary sciences are subject by virtue of their "extrinsic" modus operandi: the folly of presuming to fathom the depths of the universe having barely scratched the surface in the discovery of man himself. Finding himself, thus, irreconcilably at odds with the prevailing Zeitgeist, Smith decided to forego a professional career in the fields of his primary interest-i.e., physics and philosophy-in favor of pure mathematics: the one and only academic discipline, he avers, in which "political correctness" can find no foothold. And so he enjoyed the luxury of pursuing a respected university career while being at liberty, as he puts it, "to remain perfectly sane." It is no wonder, then, that when he finally confronted the so-called quantum enigma, Smith perceived the issue in a very different light than his peers. The problem all along had actually not been "technical"! It was not a question to be resolved by way of differential equations, nor primarily a matter of finding something new-but one of jettisoning an entire Weltanschauung. And for Wolfgang Smith this posed no difficulty: he had in fact done so decades earlier, as can be discerned in his remarkable series of publications. Wolfgang Smith's life and work are the subject of the documentary film The End of Quantum Reality, scheduled for release in early 2019.

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Physics and Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality

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