INTRODUCTION

If you dream of understanding the reasons why things happen and how the world is made, if you are fascinated by the stars and elementary particles, if deep curiosity about research and an urge to make progress direct your life, then this book is for you and I will tell you a story. It is the story of a journey into the other side of things.

Do you remember your first questions: who are we, where do we come from, where do we go, is the universe finite or infinite, what is eternity, is there life on other planets, what is the atom made of, and so on? How many of these questions have really been answered? This book does not propose solutions, but rather suggests avenues of research and points of view you can use to trace knowledge along an ancient path that is ever new.

In my school days, I wondered what marked one body as different from other bodies, since they are all basically made from the same ingredients. As all matter is formed from only ninety-two elements (and a few others that at that time were still to be discovered), how can there be such variety? In addition, these ninety-two elements are in turn composed of particles that are always the same. Think about it: the elementary particles are the same throughout the whole universe. Our brain has the same cloud of electrons as a stone, a leaf, and a whale. The more we probe matter under the microscope, the more it appears amorphous, formless, without those very differences that distinguish bodies and substances. If oceans, mountains, plants, animals, and all other things are aggregates of elementary particles, what gives them their material shape? Different things are differentiated by their form, not by the particles that actually make up the matter of which they are made. What is it then that determines identity? Does form give meaning to matter?

Aristotle writes of a “basic matter” or “prime matter” (image, matter without form), the origin or basic matrix from which all bodies arise. What relationship can there be between the Aristotelian model and the amorphous material decomposed into elementary particles? The key to knowledge is not limited to particle physics: research keeps on finding new and even smaller particles, but does not reveal the secrets of existence or tell us what things are ultimately made of. The reason is simple: research insists on investigating “from our side.”

The first requisite in order to obtain access to “the other side” is to free ourselves from the concept of necessity, on which our investigative mechanisms have so far been based. Ever since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, evolution has always been prompted by necessity, from which no living being can escape! Necessity was then Ananke, the Greek mythical divinity. Events were seen as having no causality, instead happening because they were necessary. Even the meaning of things was thought to always be born of the goddess Ananke, by necessity. If matter were invisible it would not matter! It becomes of consequence only when registered by our senses, and this in turn occurs only when we deem it necessary. No one is interested in what happens on one of Saturn’s moons! Physical bodies have no meaning to us without our interest in them; to arouse our interest, they must be considered relevant on some level. An item of showroom furniture has no meaning until we start to consider buying it and how it might look in our home.

Knowing comes from the need to survive and from curiosity. Behind both lies fear. Each form is determined by function, the function of need and the necessity of fear, without which there would be no evolution. Knowledge is also a medicine for fear and in the past stemmed from seeing, seeing with the eyes and also with the mind. In ancient Greek, the verbs to see and to know have a common root, vid: “to see with the eyes,” “to see with the mind.” Today, fear still allows us to know but not to see. Humans have tried to remove as much fear as possible from within the twenty-four hours, reducing it to a few minutes a day. But nature invents needs in order to organize programs.

Today scientific research continues to investigate the part of the world to which we give meaning. If we want to gain access from the other side, we must distinguish between the meaning of things and the meaning we attach to them. On the one hand is the meaning that the universe gives to itself and on the other the meaning that we allocate to it, and each one does not care about the other. Imagine if suddenly the universe decided to disobey its own laws, its own meaning, pausing its activities for just a minute: everything would collapse, including us! Fortunately the universe is not a member of a trade union, and it doesn’t go on strike. We cannot even imagine the sheer scale of it, nor have we any idea of how big it may be or the form it might have. If it is formless to us and beyond our comprehension, then it loses meaning and becomes of no interest. Out of seven billion humans, how many are in fact scientific researchers dedicated to the study of the universe? Probably less than the number of flies that hit the windshield of a speeding car.

It is form that gives significance to matter. The sand in a bucket tells nothing to the little boy who plays with it; it lacks meaning. The woman who is separated from her husband by the expanse of the Namibian desert might see that desert, that sand, as the pure expression of long-sought freedom. But the same husband, lost in that desert, will give it a very different meaning, and he may even die of thirst because of it. Yet it is the same sand that their little boy plays with in his bucket.

The big bang—if indeed it occurred—was an explosion from which sprang our heavenly bodies and the laws that still seem to be governing the expansion of the universe. Out of this infinite array of possibilities, we seem capable only of attaching significance to the things we need. Research on this basis will always be misleading and incomplete.

It is necessary to explore the other side in order not to stand still, just counting particles and talking about them. Such exploration is what many great people in history have done—Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo, Bruno, Newton, Leibnitz, Mozart, Einstein, Böhm, some other quantum physicists, Eastern mystics, Western poets, teachers, saints, sages, and philosophers—when physics was not yet divorced from philosophy! They have left traces everywhere of one big secret that has been handed down through the centuries, both concealed and revealed. Each in his or her own way, appropriate to his or her own time and culture, has told us a story, a story at times scattered diversely through forests of symbols and enigmas. But if we look again closely, using the keys provided in this book, we might yet still see a magical thread leading us to the very origin of the biggest secret in world history: the proof that the world in which we find ourselves is a perfect, immense, deceptive, virtual reality, made of nonexisting matter.

Have you ever wondered how nature creates itself? Do you agree that, before making something, you should draw up a plan that includes the information necessary to build the forms and architecture, parameters and relationships, materials and facilities? Any construction, from a toy to a skyscraper, must have a design beforehand. So does Mother Nature.

The universe is a design that evolves through becoming. The word nature derives from the future participle of the Latin verb nascor, “to be born”; it indicates that the essence of a thing is not what it seems, but what it is not yet and will be: the design of its future projection. Consequently, physics, (from φimageσις, “nature”) has to investigate not only what is manifested (quantifiable and measurable) but also and especially what is not yet: the design that holds the world together.

I began to deduce the secret of matter during my years spent in the laboratory. I discovered that the universe is full of codes that define and inform the nature of things. To inform means, first of all, “to provide form,” and these codes appear to play important roles in the architecture of bodies: their structure, characteristics, quality, and functions. They also regulate growth and development. You can think of these codes as being something like bar codes or fingerprints.

I want to share with you the fascinating things I have learned about these codes—which I term basic codes—that operate at every level of reality, functioning as a matrix, a regulating system, and a means of communication throughout the universe. A few fundamentals, which we will explore in detail, are:

In order to share my discoveries with you, I invite you to take a journey with me, a journey into the essence of matter and beyond, into the mysteries of the field of information pervading and connecting everything. Our research into the design of the universe requires a new method, a newborn physics that does not yet have adequate means to confirm hypotheses, for there are only clues of the existence of codes (whose nature is not molecular) to help direct this pursuit. We will explore where there is no perception, the emptiness that is not empty. The other side of things.