Advancing its work of Christian apologetics in relation to science and scientism, FoS is pleased to announce that John Taylor, who worked and cooperated with Wolfgang Smith in his last years, has offered to continue Dr Smith's work by writing twelve original essays over the course of 2026 for possible publication as a book.
Irreducible Wholeness and Physics:
1. Disentangling Irreducible Wholeness Essay 1
2. Disentangling Irreducible Wholeness Essay 2
3. Towards a Platonist Ontology of Physics Essay 1
4. Towards a Platonist Ontology of Physics Essay 2
Mind and Perception
1. Clarifying the Corporeal World
2. James Gibson and the true Science of Perception
3. The Binding Problem
4. Extra-Sensory Perception and Vertical Causation
5. Goedel’s Theorem and Irreducible Wholeness
Religion and God
1. Smith and the New Apologetic
2. Smith, Vedanta and the Catholic Faith
3. God, Vertical Causation, and Theology
In the modern laboratory, the physicist often resembles a musicologist who attempts to account for a symphony by meticulously documenting the physical vibrations of a single cello string. By measuring frequencies, amplitudes, and durations, he produces an exhaustive ledger of data. Yet, despite the precision of his instruments, he finds that his quantitative account remains strangely hollow; the music itself—the irreducible coherence that makes a symphony a symphony—continually eludes him.
This, in essence, is the predicament of contemporary science. By prioritising the "strings" of the material world—the isolated parts and measurable quantities—we have inadvertently silenced the "symphony" of the Whole. In our previous essays, we identified this missing coherence as Irreducible Wholeness (IW): the ontological ground that allows any science to function, and the source of that vertical unity which precedes all division.
We now stand at the threshold of a new synthesis: a Platonist ontology of science. We have begun to trace the "grounding-to-emergence" relationship, the mechanism by which the hidden reservoir of Irreducible Wholeness informs the emergent patterns of our theories. Just as the composer’s intent provides the ground for the orchestra’s performance—a ground that only becomes fully audible in the complex interplay of higher-order movements—so too does IW ground the structural form of our scientific theories. Whether in the deterministic gears of classical mechanics, the mysterious entanglement of quantum states, or the cosmic architecture of the universe, this foundational unity is what enables the acoustic cascade of physical phenomena to sound ordered and cogent.
In this third essay, we shall further elaborate on these principles, moving beyond the preliminary mapping of the landscape. By applying this framework to the domains of classical physics, quantum theory, and cosmology, we aim to demonstrate that the "strangeness" of the modern worldview is not a failure of logic, but a symptom of the mind attempting to grasp the higher, vertical architecture of the cosmos through a purely horizontal lens. It is time to shift our focus from the artifice of human calculation to the foundational reality of the Whole, recovering a mode of scientific inquiry that recognises its own participation in the intelligible order of the Logos.
Towards a Platonist Ontology of Science Essay 1. This essay articulates and develops two principles of Smith’s Platonist Ontology of Science. Principle 1:Irreducible Wholeness is the essential element that enables any science to work. Principle 2: There exists a grounding-to-emergence relationship between Irreducible Wholeness and the structural form of all scientific theories. The essay then demonstrates how these principles illuminate three major domains of physics: classical physics, quantum theory, and cosmology. In doing so, it establishes a conceptual framework that invites further extension across both the other hard and soft sciences
With the results established in the previous two essays we have taken significant strides towards articulating what Wolfgang Smith, in the evening of his life, referred to as a Platonist ontology of physics. However, despite our preceding efforts, the precise contours of such an ontology remain yet to be traced.
In the previous essay, I derived two central conclusions concerning the nature of irreducible wholeness extending from Prof Smith’s entanglement theorem. Principles that, I believe, provide the foundational groundwork necessary for formulating a genuinely Smithian ontology of physics. These principles can be stated as follows:
Principle 1: Irreducible Wholeness is the essential element that enables any science to work.
Principle 2: There exists a grounding-to-emergence relationship between Irreducible Wholeness and the structural form of all scientific theories.
In the following essay, I will elaborate further on these principles and explore how they may serve as the foundations for constructing a truly Platonist ontology of physics. To this end, in Part 1, I will begin by clarifying the meaning and implications of the two principles established previously. Next, in Part II, I will demonstrate how these principles illuminate three central domains of physical inquiry: classical physics, quantum theory, and cosmology.
Part 1: Clarifying the Principles of a Platonist Ontology of Science:
As stated, before there are two principles of a Platonist ontology of science which must now be clarified.
Principle 1: Irreducible Wholeness is the key element of any science that allows it to work.
Put simply, this principle means that Irreducible Wholeness is the fundamental element which makes any science tick. It is that element which, basically, allows a science to become complete and to receive its full cogency.
There are very strong grounds to affirm this first principle of Smithian science. One being that within a Smithian cosmos, Irreducible Wholeness serves as the generative source from which all cosmic realities emanate. (Apart from God who is the underlying source of Irreducible Wholeness itself).
As a result, it follows that any science exists by way of IWs’ activities and sustaining powers. Thus, IW is what enables a science to work and to have an underlying cogency. However, the precise way that IW “makes a science work” varies drastically from science to science.
In this essay, we will be concentrating purely on physics. But, in general, there are two ways that irreducible wholeness can enable a science to function—which extend to all the hard and soft sciences.
Firstly, on the one hand, IW may enable a scientific theory to function by manifesting as an irreducible feature necessary for that theory’s completion. This is exemplified by Smith’s entanglement theorem, in which quantum entanglement appears as an IW within quantum theory and thereby contributes to the theory’s completeness. Without the concept of entanglement, the framework of quantum mechanics would not operate coherently and would therefore remain incomplete.
Secondly, IW may “make a science work” by serving as the starting point from which a scientific theory develops. This is the case in both classical and quantum mechanical physics. One way to understand this is to think of IW as an “ontological branch” out of which the various sums-of-parts theories of physics necessarily grow.
In either case of how IW completes a scientific theory, the underlying claim remains fundamentally the same: Irreducible Wholeness is what ultimately enables a science to function by providing the grounding that allows it to operate coherently and to function as a science at all.
Principle 2: There is a conjectured grounding-to-emergence relationship between Irreducible Wholeness and the structural form of all scientific theories.
As discussed in the previous essay, Principle 2 proposes that IW provides the underlying ground or foundation of a scientific theory, yet the evidence of this ground only becomes visible at the higher-order levels of the theory itself. A useful analogy elucidating this principle can be found in the culture of a company. A corporate culture might be foundational to a company, by shaping how it functions and develops etc, however, its culture is not directly discernible at the most basic operational level (e.g. employees quietly administering payroll at desks). Instead, it becomes observable in “higher-level interactions”, such as the dynamics that emerge in meeting rooms or collaborative decision-makings amongst business directors. There is, in other words, a kind of concresence relationship between the ground of a scientific theory, which is always IW, and its manifestation—which occurs at the higher-order levels of a theory.
This same grounding-to-emergence relationship, I conject, applies to the whole gamut of hard and soft sciences. In physics we have seen that this grounding-to-emergence relationship manifests in the entanglement theorem (ET). However, as we will see in this essay and the next, this relationship appears across virtually every science: from physics to economics.
When put together, these two principles function as the backbone of the Platonist ontology of science which, prior to his passing, Smith made significant advancements towards developing but ultimately came up short of ever fully completing. It now falls to us to bring Smith’s final unfinished symphony to completion!
Part 2: The Three Areas of a Platonist Ontology of Physics:
Having clarified the two principles of Platonist science, we can now turn to examining how their application extends across the three central domains of physics. These domains being: classical physics, quantum theory, and lastly cosmology.
Classical Physics
While classical physics encompasses a wide range of phenomena, it is fundamentally grounded in the principle of determinism and the assumption that physical quantities—such as heat—vary continuously over time.[1] At more advanced levels of classical theory, such as statistical mechanics, probabilistic methods are employed to make predictions about large ensembles of particles. However, these probabilities arise not from any intrinsic indeterminacy in nature, but from practical limitations: in principle, such systems remain reducible to the deterministic laws governing the motions of individual particles in classical mechanics.[2]
In short, the principle of determinism states that if you know the exact initial conditions of a system (e.g. positions, velocities etc) then the future and past states of that system are uniquely determined by the laws of physics. The specific laws used to extrapolate the past and future states of that system vary wildly depending on the adopted mathematical formalism. For example, if one were to choose a Lagrangian formulation, then one would calculate the evolution of that system by applying the Euler–Lagrange Equation to the Lagrangian Mechanics function L=T−V, deriving differential equations of motion whose solutions give the positions and velocities of the system as functions of time.[3]
If instead one used Hamiltonian Mechanics, the dynamics would be obtained from Hamilton's Equations, which determine how generalized coordinates and momenta evolve in phase space.[4]
In either case, although the mathematical formalism differs, the underlying idea remains the same: once the initial conditions are specified, the governing equations uniquely determine the system’s past and future evolution.
Where IW primarily plays its role in classical physics is in principle 1 through the origination of the theory itself. In his final book Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology Smith argues that a corporeal object X is an IW and that its corresponding SX, which is also an IW, receives its being by participating in X. From this Smith concludes that the primary physics governing an SX is classical. However, he also maintains that there are some exceptions where quantum theory can be used to describe an SX. In short, classical physics may be regarded as the default physics of an SX and quantum theory as the exception to this rule.[5]
As it pertains to the first of the two principles of our emerging Platonist science, classical physics is made complete by Irreducible Wholeness in two primary senses. Firstly, the IW of an X allows for the existence of classical physics through bringing about the existence of an SX—whose default description is with classical mechanics. Hence, the IW of an X acts as the point of origination of a classical theory.
In relation to Principle 2, we do indeed encounter, at higher-order levels of classical mechanics, features that cannot be straightforwardly reduced to the lower-level elements of classical physical theory. A particularly clear example of this arises in thermodynamics. Although thermodynamics ultimately rests on a statistical treatment of vast numbers of microscopic particles obeying the deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics, it introduces concepts that do not appear at the microscopic level. Most notable among these is the notion of time-irreversibility. Thermodynamic processes characteristically exhibit a preferred temporal direction—captured in ideas such as entropy increase and the “arrow of time.”[6] This asymmetry cannot be derived directly from the time-symmetric, deterministic equations that govern individual particles in Newtonian mechanics. Rather, it “emerges” only when the collective behaviour of large ensembles is considered, illustrating how higher-level theoretical descriptions can possess genuinely novel features that resist reduction to the fundamental laws from which they are said to arise.
Therefore, both, principles 1 and 2 manifest in precisely two ways in classical mechanics. The first principle, manifests by generating classical mechanics through the top-down imposition of IW from an X onto an SX. The second principle of grounding-to-emergence manifests in the form of irreducible features at the higher-order level of the theory’s expression (as seen in Thermodynamics).
Quantum Theory
In quantum theory, as we have seen, irreducible wholeness manifests in two ways. Firstly, as stated in Principle 1, IW provides the grounding that enables the theory to exist in the first place. Unlike classical physics where this grounding happens organically via a parasitic relationship between X and SX in quantum theory this grounding is brought about by an “injection of IW into the transcorporeal realm”.[7] As Professor Smith states it is “the passage of IW into the beingless realm of the transcorporeal that brings about the strange new physics of the quantum realm”.
This strange new physics is grounded, therefore, by IW dynamically entering into and exiting the beingless realm of transcorporeality. Whereas, with classical physics, the theory is grounded by a top-down impression of IW onto an SX from an above X.[8]
In addition, we have also seen that principle 2 manifests in the form of quantum entanglement which is a higher-order phenomenon. At this juncture, it is also worth adding that the manifestation of entanglement, which is an irreducible wholeness, is essential to the theory’s completion. Whereas, in classical mechanics the irreducible features of time-irreversibility are not essential to the completion of lower-level classical theories, such as Newtonian mechanics, but are instead essential elements when the theory takes on a higher-level form. There is, therefore, a partitioning of standard classical mechanics which allows us to distinguish between its lower-level which is largely free of irreducible features and its statistical manifestation, at the higher-level, which is rife with features that are irreducible to the lower level.
Cosmology
In cosmology, once again, IW manifests according to the two principles of Smithian science.
First, in line with Principle 1, IW grounds cosmology because the cosmos, in truth, is an irreducible wholeness. As Thomas Taylor writes—whom Professor Smith cites frequently—the “cosmos is a whole mundane animal”.[9] A sacred Theophany of the Triune God. Meaning that, when we consider the three essential elements of the cosmos—the aeviternal, the intermediary, and the corporeal—the cosmos must be understood as an irreducible wholeness and this wholeness is representative of the divine.
Furthermore, this grounding of the entire cosmos manifests in the higher-order levels of the observable cosmos that we see in the night sky. Firstly, for instance, in Mach’s principle, something which Smith took to be essential to explaining Geocentrism. In the last years of his life Smith became deeply preoccupied with this idea. Speculation was rife that Mach’s principle could lead to a deeper understanding of the connection between IW and the observable universe.
According to Ernst Mach inertial frames, these are local unaccelerated frames of reference, wherein an object is moving at a constant speed in a straight-line, are determined by their relationship to the fixed stars. That is to the star-field background of the whole universe. In other words, the universe as a whole determines the nature of local inertial frames of reference. There is, in other words, an IW manifesting at the highest levels of the observable universe which has a top-down effect on the local inertial frames of reference that we inhabit.
Secondly, evidence of IW, manifests in the higher-order levels of the cosmos in the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). For those unfamiliar, the CMB map is background radiation said to originate from the Big Bang. However, in the Smithian cosmos, we may speculate that the CMB represents not necessarily background radiation from the Big Bang. But, instead, the descent of IW into the corporeal world from aeviternity. It represents, if you will, the scattering of Irreducible Wholeness as it descends from aeviternity into corporeal reality. Hence, the descent of IW into the corporeal realm is encapsulated by the CMB as a kind of condensation of IW into corporeality.
Where can we go to next?
In closing we have outlined, the ways, in which physics can be interpreted using the two principles of Smithian science. What is needed next is a radical extension of these principles to see how they might be applied to the other sciences from biology and chemistry to the soft sciences of economics and sociology.
Bibliography:
Smith, Wolfgang (2023), Physics: A Science in Quest of An Ontology (PSQ). Edition 2. Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation.
Taylor, John R. (John Robert), 1939-. Classical Mechanics. Sausalito, Calif. :University Science Books, 2005.
SEP, Thermodynamics Asymmetry in Time, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-thermo/
The Works of Plato, 1804, Vol II, Thomas Taylor, London, R. WILKS, CHANCERY-LANE
[1] See Classical Mechanics, Dr J R Taylor, Chapter 1
[2] See SEP, Thermodynamics Asymmetry in Time
[3] See Classical Mechanics, Dr J R Taylor, Chapter 7
[4] See Classical Mechanics, Dr J R Taylor, Chapter 13
[5] Smith, PSQ, P.26-27
[6] See SEP, Thermodynamics Asymmetry in Time
[7] See PSQ, P.39
[8] Smith, PSQ, P.29
[9] Taylor, Thomas, The Works of Plato, 1804, P.417