Kickstart a paradigm shift. Fire a perceptual revolution. (And get a brand new handle on how your world really works.)
What’s The God Problem?
The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates is an upcoming August book from Howard Bloom, the man who has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain's Channel4 TV and "the next Stephen Hawking" by Gear Magazine.
One Nobel Prize-winner and two MacArthur Genius Award winners say The God Problem is “spectacular.” So do luminaries like Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Sunday Magazine’s Charles Siebert, and Associated Press veteran Walter Putnam. More important, Heinz Insu Fenkl, director of SUNY's Interstitial Studies Institute says The God Problem is “the next paradigm,” a book that “will take you to a place from which you will never re-emerge.”
What’s the God Problem all about?
There's a secret hidden in a mathematical nugget called Peano's Axioms. Is Peano's mystery the key to the cosmos?
The God Problem tackles the puzzle of how a godless cosmos creates; of how a universe without a bearded and bathrobed god in the sky pulls off acts of genesis. And it pursues the riddles behind five mildly flabbergasting heresies:
- a does not equal a
- one plus one does not equal two
- entropy is wrong
- randomness is not as random as you think and
- information theory is way off base.
The result? Says James Burke, creator and host of seven BBC TV series, including Connections, "Enthralling. Astonishing. Written with the panache of the Great Blondin turning somersaults on the rope above Niagara. Profound, extraordinarily eclectic, and crazy. The most exciting cliffhanger of a book I can remember reading."
Why do we need you?
A paradigm shift can flip the way that you and I see everything around us and everything inside of us. Equally important, it can flip the vision of the leaders who make the policy decisions that shape your life and mine.
Paradigm shifting takes work. It takes snapping the media to attention. Five New York Times staffers and contributors are reading The God Problem. One says The God Problem is “mind-bending” and “daring.” Another says it’s “ebullient” and “enthralling,” a “piece of intellectual detective work, bursting with original insight.” And David Swindle, associate editor at PJ Media, says that The God Problem “will change your life.” But that’s just a tiny start.
Paradigm shifting takes a media campaign. Not just any media campaign. A saturation media campaign. Dan Schneider--founder of the 125-million-hit arts-and-ideas website Cosmoetica.com—is the writer Roger Ebert calls the “ideal critic.” Schneider poses a question: “Is The God Problem a great book like Darwin’s The Origin Of Species, Lyell’s Principles Of Geology, or Newton’s Principia Mathematica?” That’s for you to decide. But Darwin and Newton mounted intense, long-term campaigns to make sure that their ideas gave new tools to your mind and mine.
Now it’s time to make sure that even newer tools of thought are available to the very highest and the very lowest levels of the global mind.
What does Bloom know about media campaigns?
Howard Bloom, the author of The God Problem, is an expert in mass behavior, from the mass behavior of quarks to the mass behavior of human beings. From 1968 to 1988, Bloom undertook one of the strangest Voyages of the Beagle in the history of science. He entered a field he knew nothing about, pop culture, an arena he saw as “the mythmaking machinery of modern society.” And he founded and ran the biggest PR firm in the music industry, building or sustaining the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Aerosmith, Queen, Kiss, AC/DC, Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run-DMC, and over a hundred others. His star-making generated $28 billion in revenues (more than the gross domestic product of Oman or Luxembourg) for companies like Sony, Disney, Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola, and Warner Brothers. All in a quest for scientific understanding.
Bloom designed the media campaigns that helped turn ferociously committed nineteen year olds who deserved to be stars into household names. Nineteen year olds like Prince and Joan Jett. Why bother? Star making has more importance than we usually think. Pop culture icons are role models on whom our souls grow.
But changing the very way we think, feel, and see is crucial at a far deeper level. The level of gut and brain. And the level at which spirits soar.
What’s a saturation media campaign?
Says Bloom, “In the 1970s and 1980s, most music industry publicists were satisfied if they landed six stories for their clients in a month. I was not satisfied unless we landed 160. And I preferred 600.” Why? Says Bloom, “Because of our psychology—yours and mine. Something we only see once disappears from our minds. Something we see six times makes a faint imprint. But what we see sixty times sticks with us. So six is not enough."
Bloom tells the story of the Bee Gees’ manager, Robert Stigwood. In 1976, says Bloom, Stigwood wanted to accomplish something forbidden. He was a music manager, but he wanted to go into film. And the film community looked down on music industry denizens. What’s more, Stigwood wanted to take a second-tier TV actor and turn him into a film icon. Impossible. In those days, if you were on TV, movie audiences wanted to have nothing to do with you.
What did Stigwood do? He hired three PR firms simultaneously. Each firm had a different area of specialization. One was good at glitzy, glossy publications. Another was good at gritty trade magazines. And the third was outstanding at areas in between these two. The result? Stigwood broke through the barriers erected against him by Hollywood. And he turned his second-tier TV actor into a film star.
The movie Stigwood rammed through the barriers was Saturday Night Fever. And the minor TV actor was John Travolta.
What does a saturation media campaign cost?
A standard book PR campaign costs $20,000. But, says Bloom, it barely scratches the surface. Spend $40,000 and you can scratch deeper. But spend $60,000 and hire three publicity companies at once, and you can make a difference in the public mind.
What will your money be used for?
Your money will be used to drive the messages of The God Problem home. Messages that David Swindle, associate editor of PJ Media, says put “the power in your hands to provoke others and yourself to dig deeper and see your life as though you were looking at it for the first time… provoking people to remember how to think again.” And, the power, repeats Swindle to “change your life.”
Why you?
The publishing industry is running on fumes. Big PR budgets go to mainstream names like Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Few PR budgets go to those who work to break down the barriers of established thought and to give you new meanings. But thanks to Kickstarter, if there’s an author whose ideas you believe in, you can help that author break through. You can help kick important ideas past the gatekeepers and into the centers of power.
Why join forces with Bloom?
PJ Media’s David Swindle sees it like this:
"The God Problem will change your life. Here's the thing you need to understand about reading a Howard Bloom book. While reading it you'll find yourself analyzing yourself and the world around you in ways you never imagined.
"Bloom presents his reader with tools for understanding and interpreting human phenomena. He creates new connections you've never seen before in works that somehow combine science, history, philosophy, art, a mystical atheism, and joyous Baby Boomer optimism into a new nonfiction genre.
"Having read Bloom's three previous published books (and some of his unpublished gems too radical and honest for castrated publishers to even dare...) I've seen a progression in his work. He's getting deeper and deeper to the roots of human self-knowledge and the codes embedded within the universe's construction.
"These ideas will make you see yourself differently. Just take Howard's explanation of how something emerges out of nothingness -- his secret of why A is not A will change your life if you make the mistake of thinking about it too long and taking its implications all the way.
"Just as The Lucifer Principle will change the way you understand the evil in your heart; Global Brain will make you understand your role in steering the ships of mass minds; and Genius of the Beast will give you a chance to read the last page of the human drama so you can relax.
"Didn't get the memo that the boom and bust pattern we're so worried about in our economy goes back throughout human history and even deeper back into nature? That it's just a tool to provoke us to evolve?
"I say mistake because the error you make in reading Howard Bloom now is that you're gaining a revolutionary understanding of the world that won't be more commonplace for at least 10-15 years. One that will confound the intellectual idolaters of dogmatic political ideologies 'right' and 'left.' (I've found that partisans of both sides don't know what to make of a Bloom-style reading of the economic crisis.)
"And The God Problem is even worse regarding the power it puts in your hands to provoke others and yourself to dig deeper and see your life as though you were looking at it for the first time. Just try laying out Bloom-style arguments when the subject comes up and watch what happens.
"It's usually a lot of fun provoking people to remember how to think again."
The God Problem will change your life?
Here’s the reaction to The God Problem from those with early copies of the author’s manuscript--the manuscript that you can get if you invest in this crusade:
- "Bloody hell, what a truly extraordinary book. I'm gob-smacked." Francis Pryor, president, The Council for British Archaeological, author, Britain BC.
- “Truly awesome. Terrific.” Dudley Herschbach, Harvard U, 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- “Deep, provocative, spectacularly well written…great.” Robert Sapolsky, Stanford U, MacArthur Genius Award winner.
- “Strong…like a STEAM ROLLER…impressive…great.” Richard Foreman, founder Ontological-Hysteric Theater, MacArthur Genius Award-Winner.
- “Mind-bending.” Charles Siebert, contributing writer, New York Times Sunday Magazine.
- ”Ebullient, enthralling.” Alex Wright, Director of User Experience and Product Research, New York Times, author, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
- "The best f**cking book ever written. The ultimate scientific detective story." Mark Lamonica, winner of the Southern California Booksellers Association Non-Fiction Award.
- “A cave of wonders,” Robin Fox, former director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation
- “Utterly extraordinary.” Matt Thorne, winner of the Encore Award, longlisted for the Booker Prize
- “Thrilling.” Hector Zenil, Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Technique
- “A ‘page-turner.’” Walter Collier Putnam, 30-year Associated Press veteran.
- “Great literature.” Edgar Mitchell, sixth astronaut on the moon,
- “Incandescent…shakes out like shining from shook foil and oozes to a greatness,” George Gilder, winner of the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence, author, Wealth and Poverty
- “Profound and extraordinary.” Yuri Ozhigov, Chair of Quantum Informatics, Moscow State University
- “Absolutely sparkling with ideas.” David Christian, founder, International Big History Association.
- “An enjoyment shot through with things you never knew.” Allen Johnson, Ex-chair, dept. of anthropology, UCLA
- “Infectious.” Mark Lupisella, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- “The central illuminations glow.” Robert B. Cialdini, Arizona State University, author of Influence, the most cited social psychologist in the world today
- “Exalted! Glorious! Astounding.” Nancy Weber, author of The Life Swap
- “An entire paradigm shift!” David Tamm, author, Tsiolkovsky’s Imperative
- “What James Joyce’s Ulysses might have been like had he written about science. Don’t let anyone undersell this.” Steve Hovland, video maker
- “Genius.” Jean Paul Baquiast, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris
“If Howard Bloom is only 10 percent right, we’ll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe. There’s no mysticism in The God Problem—no God, no religion, no incommunicable spiritual insights – just the contagious joy of a great mind set loose on the biggest intellectual puzzles humans have ever faced. Whether you’re a scientist or a hyper-curious layperson, Bloom’s argument will rock your world.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, National Magazine Award Winner
Concludes Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathemantics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “Bloom has created a new Scientific Paradigm. He explains in vast and compelling terms why we should forget all we know in complicated modern math and should start from the very beginning. …Bloom’s Grand Unified Theory… opens a window into entire systems we don't yet know and/or see, new…collectivities that live, love, battle, win and lose each day of our gray lives. I never imagined that a new system of thought could produce so much light.”
Rewards
See the rewards sidebar to your right for the details.
"The greatest f**king book ever written. The ultimate scientific detective story." Mark Lamonica, winner of the Southern California Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award
Bloody hell...What a truly extraordinary book. I'm gob-smacked.
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