William Blake succinctly and unknowingly articulated the ultimate goal of Omnology:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

That perspective is achieved through a few simple principles:

• The cosmos is a search engine on the prowl to discover her potential.  All of her children, from quarks, stars, mastodons, and you and me, are her antennae, feeling out her next moves in possibility space.  And changing her irrevocably.

• This universe calls on us to radically reinvent her.

• The universe started with a cluster of simple rules, a handful of magic beans, a handful of axioms, and has been uncovering the implications hidden in those rules ever since. Bloom calls this Corollary Generator Theory.

• Implicit in the cosmos is a stairway of complexity, a stairway of shape shock.  A stairway of supersized surprise. The universe is driven to climb that ladder step after stunningly ambitious step.

• The cosmos is profoundly social. this is a conversational and gossipy cosmos. Which means that it’s mass behavior all the way up and all the way down.  Mass behavior from guzzle to zatch.

• Opposites are joined at the hip.

• When joined, opposites make supersized surprises.  For example, protons and electrons are opposites in electromagnetic charge.  But join them together and you get something radically new, an atom.  Government, private industry, and the protest industry are opposites that often attack each other.  But put them together and you get Western Civilization.

• Two more opposites joined at the hip– attraction and repulsion–two rules of social etiquette–have shown up in the cosmos over and over again at different levels of complexity, always appearing in new forms.

• Attraction and repulsion show up in the cosmos’ most basic search-engine rule—the fission-fusion strategy.  First spread out, separate, and explore.  That’s repulsion. Then come together and consolidate.  That’s attraction. This search strategy shows up in everything from the grand sweepings of cosmic dust that made galaxies to the food hunts that nourish bacteria and the cycles of boom and bust in everything from butterflies to modern economies.

• Among other things, attraction and repulsion show up in Herbert Spencer’s differentiation and integration.  Things heighten their separations, set themselves apart from each other, then become specialized parts of larger and almost unimaginable new wholes, new groups.  New supersized surprises.

• Microdifferentiation – heightening differences – leads to speciation.  Microdifferentiation leads to the origin of the species.

• All of the big bang’s children, from clots of cosmic dust to human beings, are cooperative and competitive simultaneously.  Yes, it’s opposites joined at the hip again. Individuals cooperate with the greatest consequences when they compete in groups and teams.  When they compete in gravity balls like stars, and planets.  And when they compete in subcultures, nations, and civilizations.
• Hierarchy – status, pecking orders, and social totem poles – appeared in the first 400,000 years ABB, after the Big Bang.

• The cosmos is pushed by its past but pulled by its future. It is causal and teleological all at once. This is a driven, seemingly willful universe.

• Groups of living things often act as if they are single organisms, superorganisms.

• Groups of living things—superorganisms–are learning machines, complex adaptive systems.  Each society has a group IQ.  Each society represents a hypothesis in a larger global brain.

• Complex adaptive systems work on five rules, five opposites joined at the hip, five manifestations of attraction and repulsion:

1.   conformity enforcers,
2.   diversity generators,
3.   resource shifters,
4.   inner judges–self-destruct mechanisms, and
5.   intergroup tournaments.

• Complex adaptive systems—learning machines–use the fission-fusion search strategy: spread out and explore, then come together and consolidate what you’ve learned.

• Your most painful moments, your moments of anxiety, depression, and the sense that you should get it over and kill yourself, are the products of inner judges, products of self-destruct mechanisms.  And those appalling moods add to the group IQ.

• The global brain is driven by the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle—superorganisms, pecking orders, and ideas, memes.

• The most important memes are worldviews, pictures of the invisible world.  Those worldviews are used like military uniforms to set one group apart from others.  And worldviews make each group a hypothesis in the global brain.

• New realities lead to new metaphors. New metaphors  lead to new fantasies.  New fantasies lead to new realities.

• Every society has an infrastructure of habit…and an infrastructure of fantasy.  Every society is a hypothesis in a global brain.  Every society is a new invention competing for its right to be.  Competing for its place in the pecking order of groups.  And expanding the perceptual envelope of humanity.  Adding smarts to the global brain.

The key tool in assembling this theory, the key tool in what Bloom calls Omnology, is the timeline.  The timeline of the cosmos and all that’s in it, from the Big Bang to the poetry of Andrew Marvell and beyond.

Finally, here’s the verdict on the GUT from Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Science:

“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.”