Three books, and one
stubborn question.

The sun does not rise — every eye on the planet reports otherwise, and every eye is mistaken. That gap between what intuition insists on and what evidence establishes is where the book starts, before turning on a stranger assumption: that causes only ever flow upward, from particles to molecules to minds, and never back down. No experiment ever delivered that rule. It arrived as a laboratory habit and hardened into doctrine. To audit it, Alex seats an improbable pair of reviewers side by side — Peter Atkins, who derives the laws of nature from the properties of nothing, and Nagarjuna, who demonstrated eighteen centuries ago that no phenomenon holds an essence of its own, nothing included. Along the way: a traffic jam that shoves cars around while consisting of nothing but cars, Maxwell's demon undone by the cost of his own memory, and a dying man refusing treatment until somebody tells him the arrow's exact velocity. No prior acquaintance with Madhyamaka philosophy or quantum mechanics assumed.

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