Modern Physics

‘I think, therefore I exist’ Cogito ergo sum — led western modern physics to equate mind to wisdom, in return caused a highly separated and compartmentalized society.

Each Individual has been split up further into a large number of separate compartments, according to his or her activities, talents, feelings, beliefs, etc, which are engaged in endless conflicts generating continuous metaphysical confusion and frustration.

The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups… The belief that all these fragments — in ourselves, in our environment and in our society— are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, economical and cultural crisis.

It has brought a glossy unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder; an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.

Knowing and Seeing

For most of us it is very difficult to be constantly aware of the limitations and of the relativity of conceptual knowledge. Because our representation of reality is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality.

The Eastern mystics repeated insist on the fact that the ultimate reality can never be an object of reasoning or of demonstrable knowledge…

‘We know not, we understand not How one would teach it’ - The Upanishads

‘The Tao that can be told is not the Tao’ - Tao Te Ching

If there is an intuitive element in science, there is also a rational element in Eastern mysticism.

The firm basis of knowledge on experience in Eastern mysticism suggests a parallel to the firm basis oof scientific knowledge on experiment.

The complexity and efficiency of the physicist’s technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystic’s consciousness — both physical and spiritual — in deep meditation.

Physicists know that their methods of analysis and logical reasoning can never explain the whole realm of natural phenomena at once and so they single out a certain group of phenomena and try to build a model to describe this group. In doing so, they neglect other phenomena and the model will therefore not give a complete description of the real situation.

The New Physics

The classical mechanistic world view had to be abandoned at the beginning of this century when quantum theory and relativity theory — the two basic theories of modern physics — forced us to adopt a much more subtle, holistic and ‘organic’ view of nature.

Two separate developments — that of relativity theory and of atomic physics — shattered all the principal concepts of the Newtonian world view.

Mass is nothing but a form of energy…Gravity has the effect of ‘curving’ space and time which means that ordinary Euclidean geometry is no longer valid in such a curved space… Not only are all measurements involving space and time relative, the whole structure of space-time depends on the distribution of matter in the universe, and the concept of ‘empty space’ loses its meaning.

Every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became.

As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole.