Waves and Stones: On the Ultimate Nature of Reality

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophersHow do we understand the world and our place in it?Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age?Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction - the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world - permeates every area of human life.What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself.In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Gr