Beyond the Looking-Glass – Looking-Glass Universe

Looking Glass Universe

with Jonathan Allday and John Briggs

Saturday, March 1, 2025
9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond the Looking-Glass, Session 1 of 6

This event is LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.

John Briggs and David Peat wrote Looking Glass Universe in the wake of publishing events such as The Tao of Physics. At the time, physics was cool and popular, especially among New Age adherents looking to science to provide a context for their beliefs. The authors wanted to take different approach—to show how a range of sciences, not just physics, were converging on a new way of viewing the world: as a whole. In this context, they wanted to pose and answer the question: is a science of wholeness possible?

Now that the book is about to be re-released, it is interesting to review how things stood at the time, with one of the original authors, so that progress, or lack of, since then can but seen in context.

This will act as an introduction to the whole series.

John Briggs, PhD, taught for 25 years at Western Connecticut State University. He has taught aesthetics, journalism, and creative writing and served as co-chair of the English Department; he was one of the founders of the Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process and one of the principal developers of the MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. He is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at WCSU. Among his many publications are three books he co-authored with David Peat, Looking Glass Universe(1984), Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (1989), and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (1999). He lives in the New England town of Granville, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Allday was born in Liverpool in 1960. He did his first degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1982 and then returned to Liverpool to complete a PhD in elementary particle physics. As part of this, he was fortunate to spend some time working at the European particle physics centre, CERN, in Geneva.

Also, during that time he was co-opted onto a working party looking at the teaching of particle physics in schools and universities. The upshot was a new syllabus in particle physics and cosmology to be added to UK A-level (16-18) physics qualifications. The first questions were set in 1992.

On the back of the work on this syllabus, Jonathan wrote his first book Quarks, Leptons and the Big Bang, which was published in 1998 and is about to enter its fourth edition. Jonathan has also collaborated on a couple of textbooks and written his own books on Quantum Theory, General Relativity and the Apollo moon missions.

Professionally, Jonathan worked as a physics teacher for 30 years in a variety of independent day and boarding schools in the UK. He was a head of physics, a head of science and latterly an academic deputy head. He retired in 2020 and now runs a consulting company providing training and educational advice for schools.

Jonathan is married to Carolyn, and they have three sons all of whom are far better at sport than he was. Carolyn was a GB swimmer, which explains how come the boys can do sport. Jonathan and Carolyn live in a hamlet not far from Worcester in the UK. When not writing or consulting, Jonathan enjoys watching cricket, James Bond movies and Formula 1 races.