Search for the Great Truths

The Edgars Imants Siliņš' book “Search for the Great Truths” presents a collection of philosophical essays on the history of paradigms and ideas. The leitmotif of these essays is the principle of complementarity, contained in the postulate ”A Great Truth is a truth whose opposite is also a Great Truth”, or “Contraria sunt complementa”, i.e. ’’opposites complement each other”. The complementarity principle was formulated by the Danish physicist and thinker Niels Bohr in 1927. It has since become one of the basic postulates of 20th century science. However, the roots of this principle may be found already in the ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy of opposites, visualised in the Yin-Yang symbol. Accordingly, the essays reflect the history of ideas and paradigms in the search for the Great Truths from times as early as the ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy and Zen-Buddhism up to the most modern fields of science, such as quantum physics, synergetics, chaos theory, fractal geometry, cosmology and other integral spheres of knowledge. The essays represent an attempt to follow, along the time-vertical, the changes in and the continuity of opposite paradigms, and disclose the archetypical structures in these changes, as well as the unvarying time-independent elements. Professor Edgars Imants Siliņš (Edgar Silinsh) is the most cited Latvian scientist in the world and the most popular and world-acclaimed Latvian physicist. E Siliņš has defined the scientific basis for the physics of organic molecular crystals and created framework of electronic-state energetic-structure physics of organic crystals and physics of photogeneration and transfer mechanisms of charge carriers.