Geek from earliest days, I was always fascinated by how things work. I was probably 7 or 8 when the placing of my Christmas stocking woke me up. To my huge delight there was a cuckoo clock kit with a bag of cogs and ratchets, pine cone shaped weights and of course a little wooden cuckoo. I sat up and put it together. I didn’t work. So I took it all apart and redid it. It still did not work. So I took it apart again, and built it again. And it worked. And by then it was light, so I rushed into my parents’ bedroom to show them. The reaction was muted. My mother told me many years later that it was hugely expensive and they bought it hoping it would keep me amused for the holidays.
Physics was my favourite subject at school. But when sports cars came into my life engineering became the great fascination, spanners and speed. Then when I got interested in the mind I trained as a psychotherapist and practised for several years. Later on in life I found another field of fascination when personal computers got serious. I moved on to software engineering and systems analysis where I not only got to understand complex systems but actually build them from scratch as well. Along the way, the popular science genre exploded in the 90s, and I read voraciously. This was like a miraculous extension of my love for science fiction. The part that always interested me was how the strange world depicted differed from ours, and of course how that one worked. Here was a field of study delving into the workings of a totally unfamiliar world that was nonetheless the mechanics of this reality in which we live.
Naturally, I never expected to have any new insights in the field, but coming from an I.T. perspective the resolution to the major and longstanding paradoxes became strangely obvious. Granted this does sound very unlikely. It is well known that the days of the lone theorist making a significant discovery are long gone. But there is no new physics in what I am describing. This is just the explanation of the well-established science that has been discovered. The paradox is not because of a lack of science but a false presupposition about what lies at its root, an ontological category error. So although my only qualification is a blank slate, this turns out to be much more of an asset than one could readily imagine. As Thomas Kuhn wrote in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Those who achieve fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have generally been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they changed”. This was tremendously reassuring.
Once I began to realise the implications I found myself compelled to do my best to communicate the ideas. This has been my aim for some time, but it has proven very difficult to express it all in a form that is readily understood. Naturally I am hoping that my latest efforts will hit the spot. The picture painted of the new age this engenders has been the most wonderful thing in my life and I very much want everyone to have the opportunity to take it up. I pray you dare to know.