Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

John Assaraf is one of the experts featured in the film and book The Secret, which he helped launch into a worldwide phenomenon. He has shared his expertise on achieving financial freedom and living an extraordinary life with millions of viewers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and dozens of other media venues worldwide. Visit John online at JohnAssaraf.com.

Murray Smith is a business growth expert who has built thirteen businesses, including Indian Motorcycle which he bought just the name from bankruptcy and built it into the second largest U.S. motorcycle company. He has helped thousands of small business owners in thirty countries and has been featured in national and international media, including Forbes, Entrepreneur, CBC, CNN, and NBC. Murray currently owns three companies that help business owners discover new and untapped revenues by focusing on strategies to help increase revenues from their existing clients and attract new clients. Learn more at www.gettheanswer.com and www.accessmainstreet.com.

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The Answer

Atria

THE SEARCH FOR HOW THE WORLD WORKS

In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo's crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man's sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.

Still, Galileo's views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science."

For more than a thousand years leading up to the time of Galileo, science had been more interested in creating intellectually satisfying descriptions of reality than in trying to see if those descriptions could be supported by proof. But with the age of Copernicus and Galileo, European scientists began the vigorous pursuit of empirical evidence. Thought experiments gave way to actual physical experiments, such as the famous moment when Galileo dropped two objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to test out Aristotle's assertion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. (They don't.)

From Galileo's time onward, scientists' precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a contemporary of Galileo's who is today regarded as "the father of modern philosophy," declared that the best way to understand how the world works would be to divide existence into two parts: the objective or material world, governed by the principles of science, and the subjective world of the mind and the soul, which would be the province of the church.

Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? As contemporary physicist John Hagelin has said, "There is a deep philosophical problem surrounding how you get consciousness out of a hunk of meat."

Despite Descartes' neat division of reality, common sense suggested that our thoughts must be connected to the rest of existence somehow. But how, exactly? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton, who described a universe of empty, three-dimensional space, through which physical objects move according to immutable laws. These laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

What we have been able to accomplish by applying Newton's laws has been truly astonishing. But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the tidy, objective, mechanistic view of the world began to fall apart. With the discovery of radioactivity in the late 1890s, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the "atom" itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

Coined in ancient Greece, the term atom means "indivisible unit," and through the nineteenth century, scientists believed that our entire physical universe was composed of these elementary particles. But radioactivity showed us that the atom was divisible after all -- in fact, there was a whole new world of phenomena inside the atom, waiting to be explored, measured, and described. And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

When we say the name Albert Einstein, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of his wild mane of white hair, or that famous picture of the distinguished physicist sticking out his tongue. Or maybe you think simply, "Genius." But whatever picture you have, you will also probably come up with "E=MC2." Why on earth would a mathematical equation for a sophisticated theory be so famous that even nonscientists recognize it immediately? Because with that simple equation, "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared," Einstein shattered centuries of thinking and radically altered our view of how the world works.

In his effort to explain the puzzling behavior of light, Einstein found the only viable solution was to stop looking within the neat framework of Newtonian physics. Instead, he introduced his own picture of how the world works: the theory of relativity. One reason Einstein's idea was so transformative was that for the first time ever, it described how energy and matter are not only related, but can be transformed back and forth into each other. A chink had been found in the wall separating the worlds of matter and energy. Now the elegant, clear-cut world of classical, Newtonian physics would be forced to move over and make room for the fuzzy, strange, nearly unimaginable world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the study of how the world works on the smallest scale, at a level far smaller than the atom. And as scientists studied the nature of reality on a smaller and smaller scale, something strange began to happen: The deeper we went into reality, the more it seemed to dissolve from view. The search for the smallest known particle of matter had instead turned up distinct yet elusive little packets of energy, which physicists called quanta.

The Einstein breakthrough comes down to this: Everything is energy. A rock, a planet, a glass of water, your hand, everything you can...