Pathways of Chance

Pathways of Chance is the delightful and often humorous telling of the life, experiences and ideas of the physicist and writer F. David Peat (author of twenty books including Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind, Blackfoot Physics, Superstrings, The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind and From Certainty to Uncertainty). Beginning with his boyhood in an eccentric family in wartime Liverpool it takes us through the swinging sixties of the Beatles, theoretical research in Canada, and finally his settling in the tiny medieval village of Pari in Italy. It explores his meetings with such people as David Bohm, Roger Penrose, Bertrand Russell and Sir Michael Tippett. It engages us with accounts of a talking circle in a tepee with Native American Elders to dialogues with leading artists. Yet each step of this life story is also an exciting encounter with ideas including the elusive nature of quantum reality, the Blackfoot world of flux and transformation, the limits to what can be said, Jung and Synchronicity, creativity within the human body, David Bohm's implicate order, art and film and, finally, the need for new forms of ethical action in the world. Larry Dossey has described the book as "a moveable feast", while Fred Alan Wolf writes that it is "an honest from-the-heart answer" to the question as to what makes physicists tick. Peat has a Renaissance mind and we learn of his excursions into film, radio and theatre. He has a gift for bridging disciplines and bringing complex ideas to life in an exciting and engaging way. His lucid writing illuminates everything from the meaning of quantum reality, the way language influences the way we see the world, the Blackfoot world view and much, much more.