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The diaries of Lancelot Law Whyte
Compiled by Brian Rothery with explanatory notes
This book is free to be read here online or downloaded. If you like what you see, and want to make a donation of any amount you can do so by contributing to the Operation Ore Group Action.
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Explanation
These diaries will be difficult to understand for anyone not already familiar with the work of Lancelot Law Whyte. His most important two books, The Next Development in Man, and The Universe of Experience can be obtained from Transaction Publishers.
There could be an enormous opportunity here for a physicist to read the diaries and go to Boston University to study the mathematics behind Whyte’s attempt to represent the grand theory.
Prologue
Thought is born of failure. This is the first sentence in The Next Development in Man, written by Lancelot Law Whyte, who lived from 1876 to1972. It well describes his life and work. Shortly after his death, his widow Eve and others who had been close to him, began to believe that his work was going out of print. Were it not for the efforts of a young friend, best-selling author Theodore Roszak, responding to a plea from Eve, his final book The Universe of Experience', considered by some today to be his most important, might never have been published. Roszak was to describe the subsequent treatment of that book by its US publishers as scandalous. Soon after publication, the returns, or charges for unsold copies, exceeded the royalties due to Eve. To this day few know that he ever wrote a book with that title, but that intercession by Roszak meant that some copies eventually found their way into the hands of admirers, to be republished by them thirty years later.
Despite a childhood spent in a great house at 7 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, he is largely unknown in Scotland. Today that house is owned by The National Trust, and is regarded as Europe's most famous Georgian House. When contacted, even the guides at Number 7 had never heard of him. A further irony is that the annual Edinburgh book fair is held in the square outside the house and part of it within the house, and the organizers of that literary event are also unaware of him. Despite huge contributions to the UK, he was ignored, and even snubbed, by the British scientific and philosophical establishment, including the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society.
As will be seen from a reading of The Universe of Experience, Whyte calls a central evolutionary thrust 'the morphic process'. This is similar to Teilhard de Chardin's forward or upward 'becoming' of humanity, and has since been further elaborated on by David Bohm, who survived Whyte by twenty years. Whyte had first expressed it under a different name in 1943 in The Next Development in Man, calling it a developmental or formative process, which facilitates its own growth.
Whyte predicted that his ideas would be accepted within thirty years after his death, and, while it remains be a prophecy that may be fulfilled by future admirers, 2002 was indeed the year that his work was republished. By then a few people who had first read him around forty years earlier, had acquired some of what he might have described as a 'vital surplus', in this instance the time and interest to cooperate in resurrecting and republishing him.
Boston University was good to Whyte, and one of his friends there, Dr. John Silber, became university chancellor in recent years. Another, Dr. Howard Gotleib, curator of the Special Collections department at the university, traveled to England to visit Eve Whyte shortly after the death of 'Lance', as friends and family knew him. They filled forty boxes with manuscripts, letters and other private papers to be stored in the special collections at the university. A few years later, Eve bequeathed both a sum of money and all literary rights to Lance's work to Boston University.
In October 2001, I traveled from my home in Ireland to Boston to look through the forty boxes of papers deposited in the Special Collections department of Boston University. I had read his major books and was well advanced with colleague and friend, Gary David of California, in a project to re-publish his most important books. I had some questions also which I hoped the Boston papers would answer, in particular about the background to some crises in his life, hinted at in his 1962 autobiography Focus and Diversions.
Within minutes after the boxes and the summary of their contents were placed in front of me in Boston, the focus of my intention was to change dramatically. There was a large envelope, which had been sealed with wax, with a restriction that it was not to be opened until 1988, sixteen years after his death in 1972. Inside was a set of school copybooks containing his handwritten private diaries, which it seems that no one other than his wife Eve knew about. She had died in 1988, the year the restriction on the diaries ended. The library staff in Boston told me that I was the first researcher to study the Whyte material.
I had been expecting background material for a story in which the main theme would be his great books. One week later, after scrutinizing the 25 years of the private diaries, I knew that Lancelot Law Whyte had been engaged in three main lifelong tasks, the least important to him it seems being his books.
First, he had spent the best part of 50 years working on a mathematical/geometric unified theory, which appeared to him to have huge implications for humankind and involved electromagnetism, and which competed with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Before he died, suddenly at the age of 76 in 1972, he seems to have been on the very threshold of expressing it. How seriously one must take this is underlined by the fact that he studied under, or worked or talked with, Rutherford, Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and Einstein. His great task also embraced psychology and biology. In the case of psychology, he wrote a book about Freud and talked with Jung. In the case of biology, he anticipated the problems and opportunities presented by human cloning, forty years before such cloning became a real possibility.
The diaries were dedicated to the recording of his progress on this great task, not to the writing of his books. They were intense, personal, at times heartbreaking, written for a future biographer, an account of the daily joys and sufferings of a great mind nearing a universal truth. As the reader will see shortly, they are quite overwhelming. They are organically linked with the emerging grand unified theory as he was also developing a new way of thinking, which has considerable dependence on the unconscious. One can actually learn to use his method by simply reading what he had to say about it.
As a relaxation from the great stress of working on the mathematics of the grand theory and recording his mental and emotional progress, he wrote a number of books, including what was perhaps his greatest, The Universe of Experience, which he finished just before he died.
Others will have to judge what it could mean for us if he had managed to finally express the mathematical formula in its full detail, other physicists perhaps, whether for example it could open up new possibilities through the same electromagnetic medium used by television and radio, and even be used to expand the way scientists and mathematicians think, by adding a 'values' or what he calls a 'morphic' dimension. Even without the full formula, however, from both his books and diaries and other evidence around us, it seems clear that there is now a 'mass unconscious' developed and waiting for certain information. In The Universe of Experience' he says: "The world awaits a conscious expression of something its unconscious already knows."
All of the mathematical/physics information supporting his years of work in moving towards the expression of the grand theory is in both the diaries and files of work papers at Boston University. If he was truly on the path towards a realizable goal in the area he chose, and this work has never been seen before, then it could have implications for us all. I have done my best to summarize what I believe he was trying to do here in the diary transcripts.
Go to Chapter 1.
Created on 02/03/2010 03:54 PM by Editor
Updated on 02/03/2010 05:00 PM by Editor
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