At a Glance
- Performance: Robert Temple reads his own work with the authority of a researcher who spent decades at the frontier of this subject, though his academic delivery occasionally slows the pace.
- What it covers: Plasma as the fourth state of matter, the possibility of plasma intelligence, fringe science meeting mainstream physics
- Feel: Dense but quietly mind-expanding, with flashes of genuine wonder
- Our call: A serious and accessible introduction to plasma science that earns its more speculative claims by grounding them in decades of peer-reviewed research.
I came to A New Science of Heaven with some skepticism. The title sounds like the kind of fringe science that promises a paradigm shift and delivers circular reasoning. Within the first hour, that skepticism softened considerably. Robert Temple, the bestselling author who has collaborated with Nobel laureates including Paul Dirac and David Bohm, is not trafficking in speculation dressed as science. He is doing something more unusual and more interesting: bringing decades of serious plasma research to an audience that has never heard of it.
I finished the central chapters on a rainy afternoon when I had nothing pressing to do, which felt appropriate. This is not commute listening. The material demands a kind of relaxed attention. Temple makes connections between plasma physics, the Kordylewski Clouds discovered by Hungarian astronomers, biophotons, and the double-helix structures that plasma forms under certain conditions. Each connection is presented with specific citations and named scientists. He earns the speculative conclusions by working methodically through the established science first.
The book's central argument is this: plasma constitutes more than 99 percent of the observable universe, it has been the subject of serious Nobel Prize-winning research for decades, and yet it is almost entirely unknown to the general public. Temple spends the first third of the book correcting that absence. The science of plasma as the fourth state of matter, from which gases, liquids, and solids emerge, is presented clearly enough that someone with no physics background can follow along. That accessibility is one of Temple's genuine skills as a writer.
Where the book becomes genuinely surprising is its survey of the conditions under which plasma exhibits behaviors that resemble life. Temple is careful with language here. He does not claim plasma is alive. He documents that clouds of plasma have been observed forming double helixes, banks of cells, filaments and junctions, and structures that could theoretically control the flow of electric currents. One reviewer noted that reading this made them reconsider everything they had previously absorbed from Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Daoism, finding that Temple's plasma framework illuminates many of those traditions' accounts of light and intelligence. That reading is exactly what Temple seems to intend, though he never forces the connection.
What Makes A New Science of Heaven Worth Hearing
The audiobook format works particularly well for Temple's writing style. He lectures, in the best sense of the word. There is a momentum to his explanations that rewards listening over reading. His twelve hours of material never feel padded because he is always adding a new piece of evidence or complicating an earlier claim. The accompanying PDF, available in the Audible library with the audiobook, is worth downloading before you begin. It contains supporting visual material that helps ground some of the plasma structure descriptions that are harder to picture from audio alone.
Temple narrates his own work, which some listeners will appreciate and others may find limiting. His voice is measured and precise rather than dramatically engaging. He sounds like what he is: a scholar in his seventies who has spent a long time thinking about these ideas and is now presenting them as carefully as possible. Reviewers describe the material as easy to digest for lay people, and that tracks. He avoids jargon without dumbing things down, which is a difficult balance to strike in science writing.
Things to Know Before Starting A New Science of Heaven
The later chapters venture furthest from established science. Temple raises the possibility that plasma intelligence could represent a form of extraterrestrial life we have been looking for in entirely the wrong places. He also connects his plasma research to accounts of the Kordylewski Clouds, those enormous plasma formations hovering between Earth and the Moon that were only recently confirmed by astronomers. These sections are where listeners most disposed toward skepticism will feel the pull of resistance. Temple handles this well by making clear when he is reporting documented science and when he is proposing an interpretive framework.
One reviewer familiar with Russian scientific literature noted that Temple draws on untranslated Russian papers that never made it into English-language scientific media, which gives the book genuine archival value beyond its synthesis of English-language research. That sense of recovered knowledge, of important work that happened in the background while public attention was on relativity and quantum mechanics, gives the book something that feels less like a manifesto and more like a reclamation project.
Who Robert Temple Is Writing For
This audiobook suits listeners who read popular science comfortably and want to be genuinely surprised by material they had no prior exposure to. It is not for those looking for confirmation of existing spiritual frameworks, though the philosophical resonances are real and Temple acknowledges them honestly. It is also not for those who need every claim proven beyond doubt before engaging with it. Temple presents strong evidence for the established science and clearly labeled hypothesis for the more speculative material. Listeners willing to hold both in tension will find this one of the more rewarding science audiobooks of recent years.
