Union

Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is a famous and very funny sci-fi book. In it the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked to find out the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. After thinking and calculating for 7.5 million years, it responds with an inexplicable answer: “42”.

While Adams meant this as a joke (probably – there are other theories), philosophers, mystics and scientists have been searching for the answers to the same questions for long – about the origins of the universe, about the seat of consciousness, about the meaning of life.

Many ancient spiritual philosophies advised us to find the answers to these questions by going inwards, the intent being to find ‘union’:

1. Vedanta, the oldest known philosophy (over 5000 years old – no one really knows how old it is) and the foundation of Hinduism, recommends that the individual human spirit (the ‘Atman’) should evolve to achieve union with the absolute reality (the ‘Brahman’). This union is the ultimate state of self-realisation, of achieving godhood.
2. The ‘Tao Te Ching’, written by Lao Tzu 2500 years ago, emphasises living in harmony with the universe (the ‘Dao’), which is the source of everything and the ultimate principle underlying reality. Individuals are inseparable from the Universe.
3. About 2000 years ago Jesus famously said “The kingdom of heaven is within you”. This implies that we have to journey inwards to find eternal peace and happiness, and not look outside of ourselves.

Buddhism (2500 years old) does not profess any god or deity (the Buddha was a man, undoubtedly an extraordinary one, but not a god) and focuses on the achievement of ‘nirvana’. This is a state of inner peace and enlightenment which extinguishes the grasping mind. Other relatively newer religious philosophies like Sikhism (“Ik Onkar”) and Islam (“Be!”) also state that there is one supreme God or Creator responsible for the manifested world, us and everything around us. 

Many different methods were also suggested to aid this quest for union. Deep meditation or contemplation, fasting, selfless service, devotion & prayer, drugs, dancing, intense studies of scriptures being amongst the more common ones. These methods could also be used in varying combinations. Whatever works.

However, since the Industrial Revolution began, and Rene Descartes espoused his philosophy of mind-body dualism, we have seen most forms of inquiries being directed outwards. These are driven by the scientific, materialistic and atheistic views that have overtaken the spiritual and religious ways of life that were more common in the past.

Scientific research, in particular, has made us focus on exploring the very large and the very small. 

The Very Large

Humans have been fascinated with the skies forever. We observed and wondered about the busy twinkling stars, scary eclipses and ominous comets. There also seemed to be some kind of relation between heavenly movements and solstices, equinoxes and seasons. Many different mythical and mystical explanations were used by the ancients to explain these cosmic events.

Earth is the Centre of the Universe

The ancient Greeks began the first scientific investigations of the cosmos. Eudoxus (2300 years ago) created the first model of the universe, quite naturally with the Earth at the centre – hence called the geocentric model (geo = Earth). About 100 years later, the astronomer Hipparchus created surprisingly accurate models of the motions of the Sun and the moon. The naming of the starry constellations began with the Ptolemy (Egyptian-Greek astronomer and polymath, not to be confused with the Egyptian pharaohs) in 100 AD. Much thought was devoted to what the heavens were all about.

For the next 1500 years the Earth remained at the center of the Universe.

The Sun is the Centre of the Universe

The heliocentric model (helio = Sun) with the Sun as the centre of the Universe had been proposed earlier, 2300 years ago, by another Greek, Aristarchus (busy folk, the Greeks!). It had been implied even earlier, over 3000 years ago, in the ancient Vedantic text of the Rig Veda (in the Aitereya Brahmana). But the first serious challenge to the geocentric model came from Nicolaus Copernicus (1540 AD) who proposed the Sun as the centre of the solar system.

This faced opposition.

The geocentric model had been aggressively endorsed by the Catholic Church, as it suited their philosophy that man was created by God and hence the Earth was the centre of all creation. Alternative theories were severely persecuted. Free-thinking Giordano Bruno, who proposed elaborate theories about the cosmos including the heliocentric model, was accused of heresy by the Church. His “trial” lasted 8 years and ended with him being sentenced to be burnt alive (in Rome, 1600 AD).

But soon after, the invention of the telescope in 1608 AD enabled astronomers to make far more detailed observations of the movements of the planets, leading to astronomical validations of the heliocentric model. Galileo Galilei used improved telescopes to make better observations. Based on these he wrote  extensively in support of the heliocentric model, but again the Church branded him a heretic. In 1633 he was confined to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.

But the heliocentric model had been firmly seeded. With more and more observations using fast-improving telescopes, by the end of the 17th century this was accepted as scientific truth in Europe. This was also helped by the publication of Isaac Newton’s magnum opus ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687 which provided a solid scientific foundation for the heliocentric model of the solar system by explaining his famous ‘laws of motion’. This science gave us the familiar image of our Solar System that we learn in school.

The Sun was now the center of the universe.

Galaxies, the Big Bang & the Centre-less Universe

Mankind continued to look outwards, inquiring. Many celestial objects and movements continued to puzzle. But it took over 200 more years to realize that the Sun and our solar system are just one system in a much, much larger collection of such star systems that make up our Milky Way galaxy. It was in the 1920s that the astronomical work of Edwin Hubble (after whom the famous space telescope is named) was instrumental in discovering this.

Our galaxy was now the center of the Universe.

But Hubble’s work, along with that of many others later in the 1920s and 1930s also showed that the Universe is constantly expanding. This discovery led to the realisation that our Universe was created in a primordial explosion (the Big Bang) about 13.7 billion years ago and now contains billions of galaxies. While it was first proposed in the 1940s and was hotly debated, the Big Bang model started gaining wider acceptance only by the 1970s.

According to the Big Bang theory, it is meaningless to even think about the Universe having a center – it doesn’t have one.

The More We Know, The Less We Know

We thought we’d figured it out. Not quite yet. The model of an expanding Universe led to a few ‘technical’ problems – one of which was that there isn’t enough observed matter (stars, planetary systems, galaxies) in the Universe to explain the rate of expansion and the strength of gravity. Scientists had to come up with a new kind of matter to fix this problem – “dark matter”. But since dark matter doesn’t interact with our normal matter, we haven’t been able to detect it – yet. Hence “dark”.

There are more unknowns. While dark matter, along with our normal matter, regulates the rate of expansion of the Universe, scientists had to come up with an even stranger ingredient to explain the observed acceleration in the rate of expansion for the Universe. They call it “dark energy” and it pervades the Universe. But has it been detected? Nope, not yet. Hence “dark”.

The math goes like this: 5% normal matter + 27% dark matter (undetected) + 68% dark energy (undetected) = 100% of our Universe

That’s right. The science of today can actually observe and explain only 5% of our Universe. 95% is currently not observable and hence unknown. The arithmetic adds up. But seriously?

Parallel Universes & Superheroes

And then there is the multiverse. Over the last couple of  decades, some scientists have begun playing around with the idea of a multitude of parallel universes, that is, a multiverse. There are several multiverse theories, but all of them have one thing in common – they are all unprovable. There is no way to verify these theories, so they are interesting intellectual games for scientists. More importantly, they provide fertile ground for entertaining scenarios in movies about superhero characters like Spiderman, Dr. Strange and The Flash.

So that is where we are with the Very Large. As we have expanded our perspectives about the cosmos, physicists have realised that there is less and less that we are able to actually explain. In fact, as it turns out, there is more that we don’t know than we actually do know. Isn’t that strange?

Next, let’s turn around and head in the opposite direction.

The Very Small

We have many senses (we were taught in school, erroneously, that we have just five). The main sense for humans is sight (just as it’s smell for dogs or taste for catfish). Our primary and preferred sensory inputs are those we receive from our eyes. 

For a long time, the smallest things we knew existed were those we could identify with the naked eye. Of course, philosophers had conjectured for ages about the smallest unit of matter, but these were purely theoretical exercises with no means to verify them.

Biology

The journey into the very small began with the invention of the microscope in the late 16th century. The first real microscope was invented by the Dutch father-and-son team of Hans and Zachariah Jannsen around 1600 (the same year Bruno was burnt alive in Rome). These had a magnification factor that introduced us to an entirely new world that existed below the limits of human vision.

The early detailed investigations of the microscopic world were done by another  Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Englishman Robert Hooke in the 1660s. They studied everything and anything through the magnifying lenses of their microscopes.

Hooke published his book “Micrographia” in 1665 with amazingly detailed drawings of the microscopic world including ants, fleas and cell structures of various samples. Question: how did Hooke manage to get an ant to be still long enough to observe it under a microscope? He got it drunk on brandy! The ant recovered in about an hour. We have no record of any hangover.

Leeuwenhoek continued the journey downwards, observing bacteria and microbes. He looked at various different kinds of cells. He then peered inside cells and discovered their internal structures. He discovered that each has a nucleus. For these astonishing discoveries he is known as the ‘father of microbiology’.

Chemistry

Soon after microbiology chemistry got into the game. For a long time scientists had already been playing around with various materials and chemicals, one of the main objectives being greed – to transform cheap metals like copper, lead and iron into valuable gold and silver. Many observations were made on how different materials and chemicals interacted with one another. By the late 1600s theories started being developed as to why different chemical reactions happened. Most of these were based on ideas of corpuscles and particles. We were headed for the theory of atoms and molecules.

In an amazingly prescient statement around 2400 years ago, the Greek (there they are again!) philosopher Democritus had declared that all matter is made of tiny particles (“atoms”) with spaces (“voids”) between them. He claimed that atoms were indestructible and made up all matter. Hence “atom”, as “atomos” in Greek means uncuttable or indivisible. Fast-forwarding to the beginning of the 1800s, the British chemist John Dalton extensively studied chemical reactions leading him to propose the modern atomic theory. He picked the term “atom” from Democritus.

The problem with atoms was that they are just too tiny – there is no way to actually “see” them. We can only infer their existence. For example, Brownian motion was first observed by the English botanist Robert Brown in 1827 – the jiggling of pollen grains in a glass of still water. In 1905, Albert Einstein explained this as being caused due to pollen grains being knocked about by water molecules, providing one of the earliest indirect confirmations of the existence of atoms and molecules.

Physics

After biology and chemistry, it was the turn of physics. In 1897, the British physicist J J Thomson announced his discovery of the electron, negatively charged particles contained within atoms. He estimated that they were a thousand times smaller than the atom. This was the first subatomic particle to be discovered. 

In parallel in 1896, the French physicist Henri Becquerel had discovered that atoms of uranium emit positively charged ‘uranic’ rays. Marie and Pierre Curie researched this extensively and in 1898 named this phenomenon radioactivity. But it was in 1911 that Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand physicist, discovered that these rays are in fact positively charged particles emitted by radioactive elements like uranium and radium. 

The evidence was irrefutable. All these experiments led to the conclusion that an atom has an internal structure and was not indivisible. It has a dense, positively charged nucleus which is orbited by the negatively charged electrons. And apart from these it is mostly empty space.

More particles were rapidly discovered. The nucleus itself was made up of positive protons (discovered in 1919) and neutral neutrons (discovered in 1932). Muons were discovered in 1937. Neutrinos in 1956. And dozens more in the following decades.

Bigger Science for Smaller Particles

How about the subatomic particles? Are they also made up of something more fundamental? As it turns out, yes. Particle accelerators are very big (kilometres long) and very expensive (billions of dollars) experimental setups. Inside these, physicists use very high energies to break up subatomic particles into even more ‘elementary’ particles called quarks. Quarks are of 6 types with cute names like up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom quarks, and in different combinations make up the subatomic particles like protons and neutrons. Some other subatomic particles, like electrons and tau neutrinos are also ‘elementary’ particles but are classified as leptons. It is all very scientific…and really quite confusing for us normal people!

Mass, Energy & Quantum Oddness

Quarks are 2% mass and 98% energy fields. There also are particles which have no mass and are pure energy, like the particles of light known as photons. In parallel to studying atoms, scientists were also studying energy. In 1905 (busy year for him!) Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity which included the famous equation “E=mc²”. This means that matter (m) is itself a form of energy (E). Hence they can be converted from one to the other, as we do with atom bombs and nuclear energy.

Max Planck proposed his revolutionary quantum theory in 1900, based on studies of radiation.In 1913, Neils Bohr used quantum theory to further define atomic structure. Quantum mechanics was born which deals with events within the atom. At these quantum scales, several peculiar behaviours are observed. A few samples:

• Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states we cannot measure both the location and the speed of any particle at the same time
• Particles of matter also behave like waves at the quantum level
• Quantum entanglement, in which the measurement of the properties of one of a pair of particles instantaneously decides the properties of the other – no matter the distance between them!
• Quantum tunnelling which involves quantum particles passing through impenetrable barriers –  and without which modern electronic devices wouldn’t be possible

To say that the above scenarios are weird is an understatement. They are intensely counter-intuitive. Scientists use arcane mathematics to explain them. But understanding them? As Bohr said “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it”.

Go figure.

A Pause, and A Point

Let’s take a brief pause.

The previous two sections have been a fast ride through the history of modern science, of scientists chasing the very large and the very small in search of the answers to the question: “What is the Universe made up of?”. And if much of this has been  too “science-y” for some of you, dear reader, then you have my apologies. But that is true for most people, barring a few scientists who use the ‘language’ of very advanced mathematics to understand and explain things – but to one another only!

The point I am implying is that perhaps it’s all been a wild goose chase. Upwards, searching the very large cosmos. Downwards, searching the very small worlds of atoms and the quantum. In both directions we’ve come to realize that the more we seem to know, the less we actually do know.

And hence this leads us, inevitably, to consider some perspectives on science and spiritualism.

Science | Spiritualism

Science versus Spiritualism

Modern science, especially in the past 400 years or so, has been looking outside into the very large and into the very small. Scientists have made increasingly elaborate explorations in both these directions accompanied by equally elaborate explanations. But as it turns out, the more we’ve theorised and discovered in science, we’ve also realised that we actually know less and less. It’s a wide and wonderful Universe, of which we ‘scientifically’ understand just a little.

At the very least, this realisation should be a lesson to our hubris in insisting on a solely scientific view of the world. We have been indoctrinated with the belief that science provides all the answers. Hence there is no place or need for religion and spiritualism in our world. Implicitly or explicitly, all beliefs and practices considered as non-rational were labelled as “woo-woo” and “out-there”, to be laughed at and weeded out. Or just to be ignored.

It’s not that there has been any intentional conspiracy to kill all ‘non-scientific’ beliefs and practices. But rational, scientific approaches have become increasingly popular, especially in the Western world, propagated by the achievements of science and advancements that our modern societies have got from derived technologies. This has led to scientists and technologists being put on pedestals, their words being the new gospels.

Science + Spiritualism

But it’s a lesser known fact that several famous and respected scientists held firmly spiritual, religious and even mystical views. In their own words:

1. “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

– Albert Einstein, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics, 1922

2. “There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.”

– Erwin Schrodinger, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933

3. “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

– Carl Sagan, physicist, author & TV presenter, in 1980.

And then there is the famous statement by J. Robert Oppenheimer (known as the father of the atom bomb) immediately after viewing its first explosion in July 1945. Paraphrasing Lord Krishna’s statement from the Bhagavad Gita, he said: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. He was an ardent student of the Gita, and even learnt Sanskrit to read the book in the original.

Science = Spiritualism?

Modern science has been looking outwards for a while. Scientists keep theorising newer ideas (string theory or the mathematical universe or reality being a simulation). But all of these are hypotheses, and unprovable. Even with quantum mechanics, a big success as scientific theories go, scientists remain in debate about which version is the correct one.

We have seen above that science is unable to explain many fundamental things. There are now more unknowns than knowns at both extremes of the very large and the very small. We don’t even know if we are close to reaching their respective ends. It’s now at a stage of elaborately structured “guesswork” & “beliefs”. But an approach using “belief” is no different, conceptually, from any spiritual approach.

Does this imply that a deep belief in science today is in fact no different than a deep belief in spiritualism? In religion? In gods? In the individual soul? And in its union with the all-pervasive Universe?

The Universe has a Sense of Humour

There is a Hindu mythological story about a time when all humans were gods. But they abused that divinity. So Brahma, the Creator God, decided to take it away and hide it where they would never find it again. The big question was where to hide it? A council of gods was assembled to discuss this.

The first suggestion was to bury humanity’s divinity deep in the earth, but Brahma said, “No, that will not do; one day they will dig down deep into the earth and find it”. The next suggestion was to sink their divinity into the deepest ocean. Again Brahma replied, “No, not there, for they will learn to dive into the deepest waters, and search the ocean bed and find it”. Then it was suggested to take it to the top of the highest mountain and hide it there. But again Brahma replied, “No, eventually humans will climb every high mountain on earth; some day they will be sure to find it and take it up again.”

The council was close to giving up. But then Brahma said, “Here is what we will do – we will hide their divinity deep down within humans themselves. They will never think to look for it there”. Ever since then humans have been searching for answers outside – looking, climbing, digging, diving, exploring. All of this while they lie deep within us, waiting to be re-discovered.

In the meantime, the Universe continues to exist. As it did even when we thought that the Earth was the center of everything. The stars twinkle, the galaxies spin, the Sun shines, the planets revolve around it, seasons change. We remain curious, we wonder what it’s all about, we try to explain the Universe. For this we continue to look outwards…

…and the Universe is gently chuckling.

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