Is our Science the only Science?

	Book review on The self-evolving Cosmos by Steven M. Rosen (2008) Reviewed by Max Payne, 2010 published in Network Review No 102
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In this book Steven Rosen suggests that orthodox science is reaching, or has already reached, its systematic limits. We are already used to the idea that though Euclid and Newton describe the world of human experience to a brilliant degree of precision, yet quantum physics and Einstein suggest that the universe has a deeper reality different from its appearance to our senses. The limits of our science may be shown by some key stumbling blocks. It seems impossible to unite gravity with the other three fundamental forces, the relation between mind and matter remains the 'hard problem', and the inner dynamics of the evolution of life on this planet, and the cosmological evolution of the universe remain unconvincingly explained.

Rosen suggests that the answer lies in a combination of phenomenology and topology. Phenomenology is a notoriously obscure school of philosophy, and topology is an abstract branch of complex higher mathematics. The combination of the two leads Rosen into pages, indeed chapters, of almost impenetrably dense logical argument. The reader staggers to the end of the book mentally exhausted, if indeed he gets that far. Which is a pity, for Rosen suggests another perspective on the whole enterprise of science. One wishes that he could find a disciple with the gift of lucid exposition. The result might be a literary blockbuster as significant as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Phenomenology starts from immediate experience as its primal beginning. Only afterwards is experience analysed into thinking subject 'in here' and material object 'out there'. The phenomenologist seeks to go one stage behind Descartes. Thus space becomes 'depth' before it is divided into three dimensions, and time is a total present before we define it in terms of past, present and future. The argument is clearest in the case of time. The orthodox scientific picture of time is of an ever shifting present forever moving from a past which is no longer there, into a future which no longer exists, the present itself being no more than 10 ^-43 seconds thick - the :Planck interval. In contrast to this ephemeral flux, in real human experience the present is solidly here and now. Topology is the mathematics of shapes. A perfectly inflated balloon is a sphere, but the balloon can be twisted into an infinite variety of shapes without bursting it. A sphere is just version of the balloon shape which has a three dimensional definition. Moving the description into four or more definitions makes the possible shapes even weirder. Rosen is fascinated with the Klein bottle which swallows itself in 4 D.

In this scheme the beginning of things is the formless void before subject and object separate out. Topology is then used to suggest 5 stages with 16 levels whereby the whole cosmos from sub-atomic energies to galaxies becomes manifest. Exactly the same stages determine the evolution of life and consciousness in this 'life-world' This is the picture of the 'self-evolving cosmos' of the book's title.

This is either complete hocus pocus, or the most complete reconstruction of science and philosophy ever attempted. Either way Rosen poses unsettling questions. What is the connection between the appearance of things and their reality? How far are the scientific answers we get the product of the questions we ask? Would different beings with different senses and different minds discover a different universe? Is our science the only science?

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