Theoretical Physicist Tryst with Vedanta[Indian Culture]-with Original Quotations. Part I
1.Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976) spent some time in India as Rabindranath Tagore's guest in 1929. There he got acquainted with Indian philosophy which brought him great comfort for its similarity to modern physics.Heisenberg is best known for his Uncertainty Principle and was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
"the startling parallelism between today's physics and the world-vision of eastern mysticism remarks, the increasing contribution of eastern scientists from India, China and Japan, among others, reinforces this conjunction. Physical science has now become planetary and draws into its fold an increasing number of non-westerners who find in its new vision of the universe many elements that are quick to note, one cannot always distinguish between statements made by eastern metaphysics based on mystical insight, and the pronouncements of modern physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical calculations."
"The scientific world view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word."
2.Prof. Brian David Josephson (1940 - ) Welsh physicist, the youngest Nobel Laureate has said:
"The Vedanta and the Sankhya hold the key to the laws of mind and thought process which are co-related to the Quantum Field, i.e. the operation and distribution of particles at atomic and molecular levels."
"He has turned to meditation and Indian Philosophy especially the Vedanta and Smakhya philosophy to find" scientific explanations" for the laws of mind and thought processes and their correlation to the quantum field in physics, which deals with creation and destruction of particles at atomic and molecular levels. 'Indian philosophy shows the relationship between mind and matter. Mind as seen in Indian philosophy enables one to describe subjective reality or the process of decision making as a wave function in terms of quantum physics".
3.Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)- A theoretical physicist and the Supervising Scientist for the Manhattan Project, the developer of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita in 1933 when, as a young professor of physics, he studied Sanskrit with Professor Arthur W Ryder (1877-1938) at Berkeley.
The Gita, Oppenheimer excitedly wrote to his brother Frank Oppenheimer, was “very easy and quite marvelous”. He continued to browse in it while directing the bomb laboratory. After President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Oppenheimer spoke at a memorial service at Los Alamos and he quoted a passage from the Gita. He wrote:
"Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries."
"The general notions about human understanding… which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find [in modern physics] is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom."
Oppenheimer's spontaneous conjunction of a Hindu mystical poem with a nuclear explosion was of great symbolic significance. Nowhere in Western literature could he have found an almost clinical description of mystical rapture that also fits the description of a nuclear explosion in the outer world.
4. Dr. Carl Sagan, (1934-1996) famous astrophysicist, in his book, Cosmos says:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream."
Carl Sagan further says:
"The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed."
These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas."
Sagan continues, "A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions"(source: Cosmos - By Carl Sagan p. 213-214).
In the episode entitled "The Edge of Forever" in the "Cosmos" television series, Carl Sagan visits India, and by way of introducing some of the bizarre ideas of modern physics, he acknowledges that of all the world's philosophies and religions those originating in India are remarkably consistent with contemporary scenarios of space, time and existence.
Comments
5.Jack Sarfatti ( ? ) Physicist of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group writes:
"I suspect that general relativity and quantum theory are two complimentary aspects of a deeper theory that will involve a kind of cosmic consciousness. The cosmic consciousness or the Mahat of India's Samkhya Philosophy is the basis of entire creation".
(source: Science and Vedanta - By H M Ganesh Rao).
6.Erwin Schroedinger (1887--1961) Austrian theoretical physicist, was a professor at several universities in Europe. He was awarded the Nobel prize Quantum Mechanics, in 1933. During the Hitler era he was dismissed from his position for his opposition to the Nazi ideas and he fled to England. Schrodinger wrote in his book Meine Weltansicht
“This life of yours which you are living is not merely apiece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world.”
Schrodinger’s influential What is life? the physical aspect of the living cell & Mind and matter (1944) also used Vedic ideas. The book became instantly famous although it was criticized by some of its emphasis on Indian ideas. Francis Clark, the co-discoverer of the DNA code, credited this book for key insights that led him to his revolutionary discovery.
According to his biographer Walter Moore, there is a clear continuity between Schrodinger’s understanding of Vedanta and his research:
“The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on super imposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One."
He became a Vedantist, a Hindu, as a result of his studies in search for truth. Schrodinger kept a copy of the Hindu scriptures at his bedside. He read books on Vedas, yoga and Sankhya philosophy and he reworked them into his own words, and ultimately came to believe them. The Upanishads and the Bhagavad gita, were his favorite scriptures.
According to his biographer Moore, “His system – or that of the Upanishads – is delightful and consistent: the self and the world are one and they are all. He rejected traditional western religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naïve.
(source: The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak p. 1 - 7).
Schrodinger wrote:
Schroedinger explicitly affirmed his conviction that Vedantic jnana represented the only true view of reality- a view for which he was prepared even to offer Empirical proof. (source: A Short Introduction to Hinduism - By Klaus K. Klostermaier p. 168).
"In all world," writes Schroedinger in his book My View of the World (chapter iv), "there is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction....The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad."
(source: My View of the World - By Erwin Schroedinger chapter iv).
7. Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and scientist,. Nikola Tesla, one of the most incredible inventors of all time, developed this Scaler technology in the early 1900's. Every major technology currently being used today was invented by Tesla including alternating current, television, radio, robotics etc. etc. He used ancient Sanskrit terminology in his descriptions of natural phenomena.
As early as 1891 Tesla described the universe as a kinetic system filled with energy which could be harnessed at any location. His concepts during the following years were greatly influenced by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda was the first of a succession of eastern yogi's who brought Vedic philosophy and religion to the west. After meeting the Swami and after continued study of the Eastern view of the mechanisms driving the material world, Tesla began using the Sanskrit words Akasha, Prana, and the concept of aluminiferous ether to describe the source, existence and construction of matter.
(source:http://www.hinduism.fsnet.co.uk/namoma/life_swamiji/life_swamiji_tesla.htm).
8.John Archibald Wheeler, (1911 - ) physicist, the first American involved in the theoretical development of the atomic bomb. He also originated a novel approach to the unified field theory.
He has worked with such famous physicists as: Einstein, Thorne, Oppenheimer, Bohr, etc.
Professor Emeritus at Princeton and Texas universities, studied with Niels Bohr, was named winner of the 1997 Wolf Prize in Physics, for developing the modern "black hole" theory. Has taught students include scientists like Richard Feynman, now occupies the chair that was held by Einstein.
Wheeler wrote: “I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.”
It is curious that people like Schroedinger, Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer and John Wheeler are Upanishad scholars. (source: From article - Indian Conquests of the Mind - By Saibal Gupta. The Statesman.org).
“One has the feeling that the thinkers of the East knew it all, and if we could only translate their answers into our language we would have the answers to all our questions.”
(source: Uncommon Wisdom - By Fritjof Capra p. 40).
9. Niels Henrik David Bohr, (1885-1962) Danish nuclear physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom. His received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, for his theory of atomic structure (Quantum Theory).
He is on record as saying that he goes into the Upanishads to ask questions.
10. Professor Dean Brown ( ) an eminent Theoretical Physicist, cosmologist, philosopher and Sanskrit scholar, whose translation of the Upanishads was published by the Philosophical Research Society.
In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove of Thinking Allowed TV show brings about an interesting co-relation of Sanskrit & Physics.
He has pointed out that most European languages can be traced back to a root language that is also related to Sanskrit – the sacred language of the ancient Vedic religions of India . Many English words actually have Sanskrit origins. Similarly, many Vedic religious concepts can also be found in Western culture.
He discusses the fundamental idea of the Upanishads – that the essence of each individual, the atman, is identical to the whole universe, the principle of Brahman. In this sense, the polytheistic traditions of India can be said to be monistic at their very core. (source: Interview with Jeffrey Mishlove - Thinking Allowed).
11.Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) Austrian-born famous theoretical high-energy physicist who studied with Werner Heisenberg says:
"I saw cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were destroyed and created in rhythmic pulses; I saw the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I heard its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiv, the Lord of Dancers."
"The metaphor of the cosmic dancer has found its most profound and beautiful expression in Hinduism in the image of the dancing Shiva." "The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’.
For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The bubble-chamber photographs of interacting particles, which bear testimony to the continual rhythm of creation and destruction in the universe, are visual images of the dance of Shiva equaling those of the Indian artists in beauty and profound significance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art, and modern physics."
"The idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of tome and space of vast proportions; has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models. The Hindu sages were not afraid to identify this rhythmic divine play with the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. They pictured the universe as periodically expanding and contracting and gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable time span between the beginning and the end of one creation. The scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering; it has taken the human mind more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept."
"..the two foundations of of twentieth-century physics - quantum theory and relativity theory - both force us to see the world very much in the way a Hindu, Buddhist...sees it."(source: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism - By Fritjof Capra p. 85 - 245 and 17).
Capra had shown Heisenberg numerous examples that the principal Sanskrit terms used in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy – Brahman, rita, lila, karma, samsara etc. had dynamic connotations.
(source: Uncommon Wisdom - By Fritjof Capra p. 49 and p 306 -309).
Refer to Shiva's Cosmic Dance at CERN - the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva.
12.John Dobson, scientist and a teacher. His theories in physics and cosmology boldly break new ground and significantly challenge the scientific orthodoxy. He was featured in the PBS television series "The Astronomers". John Dobson is perhaps best known for his work in the design and construction of telescopes, however, as most telescopes made today use what is known as a "Dobsonian" mount. He discusses the apparitional nature of the universe and why we are fooled into viewing it in a Newtonian-mechanistic way.
"Can we, by now, square science with religion? In particular, can we square relativity and quantum mechanics with Swami Vivekananda's Advaita Vedanta? Since there cannot be two worlds -- one for the scientists and one for the mystics -- it must be that their descriptions are of the same world but from different points of view. Can we, from the vantage point of the Swami's Advaita (non-dualism), see both points of view? Swami Vivekananda said that science and religion would meet and shake hands. Can we see things from his vantage point? Since the notion of maya or apparition as the first cause of our physics is central to the swami's Advaita, I have chosen as "The Equations of Maya". Can we find them in our physics? According to the philosophy of the Advaita Vedantins, as the swami himself has said, there cannot be two existences, only one. And maya is, as it were, a veil or screen through which that oneness (the Absolute) is seen as this Universe of plurality and change. (source: http://quanta-gaia.org/dobson/EquationsOfMaya.html#WhatIsMaya).
John Dobson was most notable for being the originator and promoter of a design for a large, portable, low-cost reflecting telescope, the "Dobsonian telescope"
13. Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) physicist. In 1905 He published his theory of Relativity. Einstein said:
" When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous."
"We owe a lot to Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."
[-(
Globalisation is a sponge which absorbs from the banks of thames and releases in the banks of ganges.
Grav se kaho hum Aryan hain.....oops.....Dravidian hain......oops.....hum kya hain.....
(H)Indus hain!
by Erwin Schrödinger [Excerpt from 'My view of the World']
And thy spirit's highest fiery flight
Is satisfied with likeness and with image.
GOETHE
For philosophy, then, the real difficulty lies in the spatial and temporal multiplicity of observing and thinking individuals. If all events took place in one consciousness, the whole situation would be extremely simple. There would then be something given, a simple datum, and this, however otherwise constituted, could scarcely present us with a difficulty of such magnitude as the one we do in fact have on our hands.
I do not think that this difficulty can be logically resolved, by consistent thought, within our intellects. But it is quite easy to express the solution in words, thus: the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object. We intellectuals of today are not accustomed to admit a pictorial analogy as a philosophical insight; we insist on logical deduction. But, as against this, it may perhaps be possible for logical thinking to disclose at least this much: that to grasp the basis of phenomena through logical thought may in all probability be impossible, since logical thought is itself a part of phenomena, and wholly involved in them; and we may ask ourselves whether, in that case, we are obliged to deny ourselves the use of an allegoric picture of the situation, merely on the grounds that its fitness cannot be strictly proved. In a considerable number of cases logical thinking brings us up to a certain point and then leaves us in the lurch. Faced with an area not directly accessible to these lines of thought but one into which they seem to lead, we may manage to fill it in in such a way that the lines do not simply peter out, but converge on some central point in that area; this may amount to an extremely valuable rounding-out of our picture of the world, and its worth is not to be judged by those standards of rigorous, unequivocal inescapability from which we started out. There are hundreds of cases in which science uses this procedure, and it has long been recognised as justified.
Later on we shall try to adduce some support for the basic Vedantic vision, chiefly by pointing out particular lines in modern thought which converge upon it. Let us first be permitted to sketch a concrete picture of an experience which may lead towards it. In what follows, the particular situation described at the beginning could be replaced, equally fittingly, by any other; it is merely meant as a reminder that this is something that needs to be experienced, not simply given a notional acknowledgement.
Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all around, with rocks thrusting through them; on the opposite slope of the valley there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; and facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-colour by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvellously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.
According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while—not long—you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father. . . thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference— the difference between you and someone else—when objectively what is there is the same?
Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, / am this whole world'.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
It is the vision of this truth (of which the individual is seldom conscious in his actions) which underlies all morally valuable activity. It brings a man of nobility not only to risk his life for an end which he recognises or believes to be good but—in rare cases—to lay it down in full serenity, even when there is no prospect of saving his own person. It guides the hand of the well-doer— this perhaps even more rarely—when, without hope of future reward, he gives to relieve a stranger's suffering what he cannot spare without suffering himself.