The Search for the Absolute

History and archaeology tell us that when our far ancestors began to settle in localized groups, they codified their lives and experiences, and formed a collective for mutual support. This proto-civilization would have arisen from each individual’s questions about the world, and their attempt to understand themselves and their place in the world. These groups, or tribes, evolved rules of conduct to facilitate communal living, and made a calendar for the group’s celebration of harvests, and other events upon which the group was utterly dependent.

This process of social evolution is the origin of religion, and of a magical way of looking at Nature. Eventually, this developing worldview was also the origin of science, which is our investigation of Nature to understand something of what is happening around us, and to use this knowledge to ensure our survival in a violent, indifferent Universe. After all, science and religion seek to answer the same question: Why and how isthe natural world the way it is? This book seeks to show how science evolved from religion and magic, in response to a need to understand Nature.

Jeffrey H. Williams was born in Swansea, UK, in 1956. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cambridge University, being awarded a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Cambridge in 1981. Subsequently, his career as a research scientist was in the physical sciences. First, as a research scientist in the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Illinois, and subsequently as an experimental physicist at the Institute Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, which remains one of the world's leading centers for research involving neutrons, especially, neutron scattering and diffraction. During this research career, the author pub-lished more than seventy technical papers and invited review articles in the peer-reviewed literature. However, after much thought, the author chose to leave research in 1992 and moved to the world of science publishing and the communication of science by becoming the European editor for the physical sciences for the AAAS's Science. Subsequently, the author was Assistant Executive Secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; the agency responsible for the worldwide advancement of chemistry through international collaboration. And most recently, 2003–2008, he was the head of publications and communications at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), Sèvres. The BIPM is charged by the Meter Convention of 1875 with ensuring world-wide uniformity of measurements, and their traceability to the International System of Units (SI). It was during these years at the BIPM that the author became interested in, and familiar with the origin of the Metric System, its subsequent evolution into the SI, and the coming transformation into the Quantum-SI. Since retiring, the author has devoted myself to writing. In 2014, he published Defining and Measuring Nature: The Make of All Things in the IOP Concise Physics series. This publication out-lined the coming changes to the definitions of several of the base units of the SI, and the evolution of the SI into the Quantum-SI. In 2015, he published Order from Force: A Natural History of the Vacuum in the IOP Concise Physics series. This title looks at intermolecular forces, but also explores how ordered structures, whether they are galaxies or crystalline solids, arise via the application of a force. Then in 2016, he published Quantifying Measurement: The Tyranny of Number, again the IOP Concise Physics series. This title is intended to explain the concepts essential in an understanding of the origins of measurement uncertainty. No matter how well an experiment is done, there is always an uncertainty associated with the final result—something that is often forgotten. In 2017, he published Crystal Engineering: How Molecules Build Solids in the IOP Concise Physics series. This title looks at how the many millions of molecules, of hugely varying shapes and size can all be packed into a handful of crystal symmetries. Most recently, 2018, the author published Molecules as Memes, again in the IOP Concise Physics Series. This title explains how the onetime separate sciences of physics and chemistry became one science, with the advent of quantum mechanics and the acceptance of the existence of molecules. In addition, retirement has allowed the author to return to the research laboratory and he is again publishing technical papers, this time in the fields of crystal design and structure determination via x-ray diffraction, in particular, the architecture and temperature stability of co-crystals and molecular adducts.