Towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth discoveries were made in physics that could not be fitted easily into our pre-existing image of reality. That the speed of light must appear the same to all observers led to Relativity Theory; that energy must accrue in steps led to the varieties of Quantum Theory. The two theories, or groups of theories, did not appear to fit together. Relativity Theory was the more explicable, though it was thought at first to be difficult to understand, and was never in fact completely understood. In the case of Quantum Theory the results of experiment and calculation appeared so bizarre that physicists gave up the attempt to fit them in, shrugged, and said ‘the quantum world is different’. It should have been obvious that this was not the case since the quantum world lies at the root of all our experience. It generates it, is part of the same thing, and must necessarily be able to be fitted in with any comprehensive image we elaborate of the whole. With the advent of specialisation and the partitioning of our intellectual world into something resembling water-tight compartments, philosophy was not called upon to play its part. The present essay has been an attempt to apply philosophical principles to the problem of integration.
I had expected at the start that this might involve nothing more than a reconciliation of Relativity Theory with the varieties of Quantum Theory, but it became evident that it was necessary as well to trace out the implications of my ideas, by way of testing them, against whatever else seemed to be reliably known or thought as the result of experiment in other areas, and this has led to the suggestion that we inhabit a Universe containing three dimensions, two spacial dimensions and one of time, the four dimensional Universe that we experience arising out of it as a perceptual artifact dependent upon the qualities of the observer and his approximate location in Space-Time. Besides linking Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory my results are consistent with the Bousso version of the Holographic Principle, and they appear also to enable the solution of a number of other associated problems, providing an explanation consonant with our everyday experience: of time dilation and Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction; of mass; of gravity; of the impossibility of altering the past; of phenomena such as non-locality and entanglement; and the identification of a possible holographic bound for the actual Universe in which we live. They also explain how the ‘strings’ of string-theory form loops. - Author's note