Have you ever wondered what it would be like to witness the
birth of the universe? To watch in slo-mo as matter and energy,
space and time, explode and unfurl into being? Well, this might
be your chance—as it was ours, one very surprising
winter's night, when a group from our editorial staff visited
the New York apartment and virtual universe of the remarkable
Howard Bloom. Bloom is most widely known as the author of the
acclaimed books The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific
Expedition into the Forces of History and Global Brain:
The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st
Century. But perhaps because he is “omnivorously
curious about everything in the cosmos,” as he puts it,
Howard Bloom is one of those rare human beings who defies simple
description. Schooled as a scientist, he probes the human and
planetary psyche with the patience of a historian, the precision
of a quantum physicist, and the passion of a poet.
After graduating magna cum laude from New York University,
Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships in science to
become, of all things, a very successful rock and roll
publicist, helping to polish the stardom of such giants as
Prince, Michael Jackson, Bette Midler, and the Talking Heads.
“I wanted to move into the center of the myth-making
machine of mass society,” he explains, “where the
human mind froths and foams.” It wasn't until 1988, when
he contracted chronic fatigue syndrome and took up an almost
hermit-like residence in his Brooklyn apartment, that he
returned to the world of science full time, plunging headlong
into the study of biology, psychology, sociology, physics, and
history. He even invented his own field of
study—paleopsychology—along the way.
Perched atop a king-sized bed, surrounded by stacks of books
and a potted ficus that had shed several seasons' worth of
leaves, Howard Bloom took us on such a journey through cosmic
history that the most basic realities we take for
granted—like matter, gravity, and time itself—began
to shift and morph around us. As the blue-jeaned genius danced
his story of the universe through our minds (occasionally rising
to do a jig atop the mattress that nearly filled the room), the
wild and mind-boggling precision of the universe's creative
intelligence came ever more fully into bloom.
–Melissa Hoffman