A newer age coming

In the 1970s, when Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav were writing their New-Age bestsellers The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, people were going nuts over the apparent connections between new physics and Eastern mysticism. What ignited their minds most was the famous excerpt from Capra's epilogue, "Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both."

However, as fads are wont, the subsequent decades were not too kind to this sort of East-West chumminess and the liaisons forged by so many of the same ilk died a slow death. Hinduism and relativity went their separate ways again; Zen and quantum mechanics parted company once more.

Till in the late 1990s, dark matter and dark energy were discovered and although they're almost wholly unknown entities, what is known is that dark energy can change the ultimate fate of the universe and how it ends. But it's not a pretty sight. The force will, in the end, literally tear to shreds everything including atoms, subatomic particles and even the fabric of space-time itself in what's being called The Big Rip.

Yet, there's also another school of cosmology that believes that this only proves that the universe constantly reinvents and recreates itself forever through forces that are unknown to science at present. Or, as Hao Wei of the Beijing Institute of Technology put it recently, "The fate of our universe is an unceasing topic of philosophy and religion. So,as a cosmologist, considering this issue is very natural." Expect the return of more New-Age books soon again.