Is Everything One Thing?

Physicist Heinrich Päs has a book out in which he explains the thinking of a lot of contemporary physicists that some ancient philosophers were correct in thinking that everything that exists is actually a diverse manifestation of one thing.

The book is titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, and in it Päs argues that quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which sub-atomic particles are somehow connected even when they're light years apart, applies not only to very tiny particles but to everything in the universe. Everything is somehow "entangled" with everything else in such a fashion that at bottom there's really only one fundamental substance or being.

Separateness, according to the theory, is an illusion, and the illusion extends to everything, including space and time.

Here are a few excerpts from an article by Päs at Yahoo.com in which he gives some insight into his thesis:

[E]ntanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole.

{I]n a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”

Nathan Seiberg, a leading string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is not alone in his sentiment when he states, “I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” Moreover, in most scenarios proposing emergent space-times, entanglement plays the fundamental role.

As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world-making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).”

Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.

A reviewer of the book at Amazon observes that,

Päs explains the relation between the quantum world and our classical world by using the illustration of the film projector: is reality the film seen on the screen or is this simply derived from the roll of film in the projector? Even further: is reality the One undifferentiated white light of the projector's lamp that the film roll partially transmits (as a lens) to the screen and partially absorbs?

Are the multiplicity of things that comprise our classical world (matter, space, time, etc...) fundamental or are they derived from our partial knowledge of the One quantum cosmos (the white light in the above analogy)?

The idea that everything in the universe reduces to one fundamental entity raises the question of what that fundamental entity is.

If it's not matter, space or time could it be mind? If it is mind then the fundamental reality would seem to be an intelligence which creates the world by thinking it into being. That sounds a lot like the God of Genesis 1.