What’s at the bottom of things? If we keep asking “Why?” where do we end up? The monotheistic faiths assert that our questions must culminate in God, a solitary, supernatural creator. Dissatisfied with that hypothesis, physicists postulate that everything stems from a single primordial force or particle, perhaps a supersymmetric string, from which flow the myriad forces and particles of our fallen world.
Notice that, for all their differences, religion and physics share the ultrareductionist conviction that reality comes down to one thing. Call this the oneness doctrine. For the past 40 years, I’ve harbored a not-entirely-rational aversion to the oneness doctrine, for reasons that I’ll disclose below. So, I’m intrigued by the conjecture that at the heart of reality there are at least two things doing something to each other. In other words, there is an interaction, a relationship. Call this the relationship doctrine.
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