• Question: There seems to be a tenuous link between physics and Eastern spirituality - very different to Western religion. Do any of you have any beliefs religious or otherwise and why?

    Asked by to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 19 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I think the link between physics and Eastern philosophy is very tenuous indeed. The discovery of quantum mechanics emphasised the need to consider the whole of a physical system to understand it’s behaviour. But I think any link between that and a religious notion of oneness is pretty much coincidental.

      For views on religion see:

      /subatomicn11-zone/2011/11/are-you-religious-do-you-feel-that-thisor-this-would-contradict-what-you-find-out-in-scienced

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Hi rowan,

      Thanks for the interesting question, I wasn’t aware of any link at all before the question, and after having a look around its a fascinating and apparently controversial topic. I have to admit after looking into it the I agree with Jony that its a bit of a strained link.

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The only aspect of this I was previously aware of was the term ‘Eightfold Way’, which referred to a group of eight ‘mesons’ (particles that contain two quarks), which led on to the development of the quark model of particle physics. It was Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann who coined the term Eightfold Way (he also coined the term ‘quark’ as a name for these fundamental particles), and it referred to the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism. Apart from the number eight, I can’t see any other reason to link these things together. So yes, tenuous is the word.

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 19 Nov 2011:

      I think this idea comes from J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhatten project. He was an avid reader of Eastern philosophy. Most famously, in an interview in the 1960’s he was asked to describe how he felt when he witnessed the successful detonation of the atomic bomb. His reply was, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. This is a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.

      I think this was just one of his personal idiosyncracies. I don’t think it constitutes a link between physics and eastern spirituality.

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