Post 2/3
2. Now to a more important point, which is only explicated near the end of this post (in blue). Sadly there's a lot of irrelevant but tangentially related spam in ths one. I can't bring myself to edit it all out since I wrote it.
But the third point in the next post is what makes this series of posts relevant to this thread.
There was a time when I was constantly noticing "amazing" match-ups/conformance between cosmology-as-revealed-by-physics and cosmology-as-revealed-by-Hindoos'-Vedic-religion. Not just the big picture matched (the two aspects of Purushottama when it's in generative mode, to the tattvas evolved), but even the tiny details (like the Shivatattva -> prathama spandana etc etc explicated in detail in Kashmiri Shaivam, which further clarified suspected connections to Quantum/Particle Physics) - everything seemed to be a perfect match. At a minimum, the Hindoo religion seemed to me to be a great means to visualise various pop-science materials on physics-cosmology that I was perusing, just like in the past I had used the latter to add to a further conceptual understanding of the former too. [Using models and analogies is a useful aid to understand other stuff, and even to try and reason about - or predict features of - said other stuff.]
However, by accident I came upon The Problem in what I had thus-far thought was this great "coincidence" of the beautiful match. Not coincidence - it implies ancient Hindus randomly guessed the right answer - I mean great confluence of independent views on cosmology. My assumption - and I eventually saw how foolish I was - had been that physics had independently confirmed the Hindoo understanding of the cosmological aspect of the universe and even of the current state and several of the possible future states of the universe.* True, physics had not confirmed - and even now just barely touched upon - that other unavoidable but intriguing phenomenon of our universe, one which Hindoo religion had dwelled upon in such detail: the nature and "origination" of consciousness, hence even of life in our universe. We're all informed that in the Hindu cosmological view (i.e. theistic, pre-classical, Vedic Sankhyam) initial *consciousness* generated matter/energy, instead of vice-versa. (And IIRC intermediate, lower-level stages of consciousness are further generative themselves, leading even to the senses - i.e. senses as products of some aspect of consciousness instead of the other way around* - while forms of matter like the 5 elements are but one of the final products "evolutes". * I personally think that consciousness leading to senses makes more sense than the inverse, but this is merely something that seems reasonable to me, not something I know proof of.) And, further, Hindoos are told about the nature of consciousness: the degree to which all individual consciousness-es are/aren't interconnected, and its (im)mortality and -uh- (im)mutability (for lack of a better term). [Specifically, that all individual/units of consciousness is connected in some way at the Purushottama-level (whether it is identical and the exact relationship to the purushottama is a question that has 3 varying views in Vedanta, but in all cases the origins are in puruShottama), that it is immortal and that it is immutable in an important sense. Immutable: in that very sense that units of consciousness are considered specifically Not immutable in Buddhism and where (i.e. in Buddhism) notions of immortality actually lose their meaning. My own conception is that immortality implies - logical implication operator - immutability (of essence), based on what I understand of established Hindoo arguments against Buddhist subversions/inversions on Atman.]
* Sagan had covered a limited view of the Hindu perception of the cosmos. I like Sagan but that bit always frustrated me because he was incomplete: he had a wealth of interconnected views in Hindu religion to mine from, but somehow only knew of the simplest interpretation of one of them. He left out the tattvas and the fact that Hindu religion does not necessarily require that it is the *same* universe that is recreated (or even one universe), but that the process of generation repeats and in fact can apply to any number of universes, not even necessarily in sequential succession. [And even the visualisation of Vishnu's bubbles and his giving life to each - once more by his being the father and his prakriti their mother, seeding them - and pervading each, lends well to a multiverse.] The Hindu cosmological view even works with the theory of the auto-merging of multiple similar universes: when any two such once-distinct temporarily-diverging strands collapse into identical futures, and hence represent one future/one universe from then on.
Even so, the limitation Sagan set on what the Hindu view must ("solely") be and have meant, is not entirely beyond possibility. E.g. Penrose (I think) is/was still seen arguing for some sort of continuation (but not involving a Big Crunch etc) in the form of a cyclical universe of sorts, using expansion a.o.t. inflation. Or something.
And alternatively, the predominant notion of a cooling death of the universe aeons from now, when the arrow of time no longer applies - and hence Time (in physics terms) ceases to exist - has counterparts in ancient Hindoo conception. The conception of Time as the ultimate destroyer of all things in the arena of manifestation - see Krishna in BG or Shiva as Mahakaala - and the notion that time itself comes to a close also, is already there in Hindoo scriptures. The end of the starry era is like the Kaalaagni (Shiva) and the end of the universe upon the gradual dissipation of all energy (practically no more light, as the stars were long since extinguished by that time) is evoked in Kaalaraatri (Uma).
Have wandered from the point. Back to The Shock/Disappointment, and why/how this all relates back to San's invocation to Heisenberg as an authority for external validation.
Where was I? Oh yes. I was always a bit disturbed by the fact that physics had threatened a limit on speed: apparently nothing in our particular universe could travel faster than the speed that light has in a vacuum (excepting, as per some other scientists, an infinite supply of energy - itself hard to come by). Or something. You know: the unforgiving law that limits our possibilities in disturbing ways. There are no laws worse than those that oppress, and this one clearly oppressed. Einstein had used this ceiling as his scary constant C in his oft-parroted formula. Since I approve of FTL in sci-fi and warp etc, it was natural to look for some scientific validation. (Absolute physical laws must be militated against and overturned when they stand in the way of good sci-fi: can't let plausible sci-fi turn into impossible fantasy, since it's a totally different genre.)
And indeed, there exist several fields of physics that run counter to a particular dominant paradigm in Physics, and one or more of which fields even propose other things about Speed. (Which actually led to another shock from which I have still not recovered.) People listed promising sounding stuff like Black-Hole Thermodynamics (don't ask me) and Loop Quantum Gravity. I think it was the latter that proposed that at the start of the universe light had a different speed in a vacuum, i.e. the value of the so-called lightspeed constant was different. In fact, this was part of a larger more earth-shattering assumption in this model of the universe: that time itself changes the laws of physics. That formulas which held true during the start of the universe need not necessarily be assumed to hold now or those that hold now need not hold in a later stage of our universe. (Blew my brain. Especially the repercussions.)
Anyway, the second-mentioned shock was that there was a lot of discord and *seriously* ugly bickering in physics, with mathematicians and some theoretical physicists huddling on String Theory's side [because it hasn't said anything to deny Quantum Mechanics], whereas other physicists - including theoretical and especially more practical ones - felt that the mathematicians (or mathematics) had hijacked physics, crowned their field the king/final arbiter, and continued physics on in a purely theoretical realm of just maths [what people have called Mathematical Platonism] as opposed to defining the physical universe we can observe (i.e. physics, *replaced* by maths). The latter's argument included that maths had led to the envisioning of all sorts of unverifiable things, such as multiple universes that we can't detect and possibly never can, while not being required to offer proof, all because the maths worked out (even if every now and then another extra variable or constant needed to be introduced into formulas to make them conform). Then mathematicians came out with more pop-science/pop-maths books - on "the beautiful mathematical universe" etc - which only reinforced the notion that "since the maths worked out", it "must therefore" be true/apply in our universe, though such a conclusion is actually founded on the assumption that the universe is made of maths, as opposed to us merely being able to model various properties/features of the universe using maths. That is, the distinction is: the universe IS mathematical from the ground up, versus that WE (us humans) can try to *understand* our universe using mathematical models. Note how the last says nothing about the objective universe itself *being* mathematical, just that our observed measurements of said universe is that its behaviour and phenomena conforms to various mathematical rules. Physics is merely the science on the *actual* nature of our universe and all things in it, and some of the physicists were pleading to go back to the good old days of experimenting and verifying, as opposed to continue to theorise often with no hope of uninfluenced verification and spin theories from theories. Such detractors from the current state of physics in the last decades were arguing that mathematicians who have runaway with their theories are increasingly coming up with maths that is internally consistent to other theoretical maths, and who then expect the *universe* to continue conforming to such increasingly-extreme maths, merely because it all makes mathematical sense to the theorists. Maybe I'm being confusing: there is the real, objective universe. And there is the mathematical modelling of the universe by humans. Mathematicians keep developing on their model - often moving past what is experimentally verifiable - and expect the objective universe to conform to what is increasingly taking place in the mathematical la-la-land of pure theory. Now I'm just repeating myself again.
Anyway, a large part of the disgruntled side's argumentation was against string theory. Physicists in other fields of physics, like Hawking (theoretical physics and cosmologist with special focus on black holes) and several famous Particle Physicists etc [I think Cox was accused], are still supporters thereof, as being a reasonable theory that at least doesn't contradict anything in other physics, even though that last in itself means nothing. While other mathematicians (like IIRC Penrose) and physicists (like that famous guy, oh dear, can't remember his name, starts with an F) are not fans of String theory. [After the Higgs-Boson results, String Theorists for some reason felt that it vindicated their field, when really, it only validated QM. Which was already validated, I thought?]
The detractors' problem is that string theory is not falsifiable, or hasn't been so far, and that it's wasted too much time that could be spent on physics that *does* show results. As those mocking String Theory explained: it ultimately also renders void Hawking's decent argument for why a god-entity is not a necessary presupposition to explain the birth of our or any universe, and hence, that gods need not exist. [Of course, this does not prove that Gods don't exist: only that the *christian* gawd has no reason to exist and that modern christian claims to the biblical gawd creating the universe is false, though really, the original christian claims were only ever about earth and visible bodies and all the "let there be light" type stuff, echoes with variation in the koran too. Besides, not all views that entertain Gods argue that Gods were to have *created* the materia of the cosmos, some merely propose that the Gods ordered this existing materia/particulate matter and were coeval with it.] So the sarcastic response was that since there was an infinite number of universes as per various String Theories, and as per the nth (4th?) stage of the mathematical development on a String Theory which argues that "anything is ultimately possible and therefore is ultimately true in some universe out there", that this would logically mean that "there must be at least one universe out there were some gods exist" (<- note, lowercased and pluralised, just as in the atheist responses to the extravagances indulged in by extreme String Theorising). They thereby showed that String Theory in a larger sense ends up undermining Hawking type arguments for no Gods, and that with the more extreme developments in String Theory all kinds of absurd things could be argued for instead and that science should guard itself against that by not getting carried away.
Of course, that's not to say that multiple universes don't exist - the supposition of multiple universes is not just a side-effect of String theory, but also of some other physics fields which do have lots of validation - just that the mathematicians have got out of hand with their theorising in purely-theoretical-La-la-land. I should really find some of those entertaining quotes that made me want to read some dissenting books for the shock-value. Those quotes were really funny and disturbing at the same time.
Back to "loop quantum gravity" which had seemed promising, since one could perhaps still argue for FTL in sci-fi that way. It led me to reading reviews for books on this or related topics by one of the dissenting (physicist) authors, in order to decide on whether I should give the work itself a go. That's when I encountered the first and primary Shock that is relevant to this post. In short: turns out that much of modern physics is "inspired" - at times directly and at other times indirectly - by Vedanta. In the former case, even the direction of inquiry and development was influenced by Vedanta. I'll track down the first quote, the rest of the matter people can look up for themselves. And so the point is that physicist Heisenbug (just kidding) Heisenberg being in total agreement or in any agreement with Hindu cosmological views and constituents does NOT make for independent proof of validity for Hindu religion. It is circular reasoning within a closed system: Vedic ideas including vedanta formatively influenced modern physics; modern physicists finding that notions from Vedic religion coincide with modern physics is therefore circular. They're not two independent systems showing independent confluence, because one is actually dependent on the other.
Here, with some context.
To repeat my actual point, since I drowned it in a whole lot of other stuff that no one asked for: the fact that so many uh founding fathers of modern physics (quantum physics and its spin-offs) tend to have been directly or indirectly influenced in their contemplations->formulations by Vedanta/Vedic religion makes the comparison unfair. That is, it is NOT independent confirmation of Vedanta to find that either modern physics agrees beautifully with it or that physicists upholding modern physics should find themselves in agreement with it.
It is merely that the seeds of thought behind modern physics - in the form of small to significant impetus here and there - is so obscured that, forgetting Vedanta's influence in inspiring the direction of inquiry and in formulating starting assumptions (and even desired conclusions) in modern physics, people find it all a great vindication. That's not to say that the cosmology as revealed by Vedic religion is *wrong*, or even that modern physics is wrong. Not at all. Am saying that holding up Heisenberg's tendency to agree to aspects of Hindoo religion is neither here nor there since his field has been too/unduly influenced by the same to count as any external/independent confirmation at all.
So, after this discovery, I stopped making comparisons between Hindoo cosmology and Physics-cosmology, since it wasn't a fair test. Sigh.
Tracked down the morbidly hilarious comments I'd seen in reviews (fortunately, had emailed these to a relative):
2. Now to a more important point, which is only explicated near the end of this post (in blue). Sadly there's a lot of irrelevant but tangentially related spam in ths one. I can't bring myself to edit it all out since I wrote it.
But the third point in the next post is what makes this series of posts relevant to this thread.
There was a time when I was constantly noticing "amazing" match-ups/conformance between cosmology-as-revealed-by-physics and cosmology-as-revealed-by-Hindoos'-Vedic-religion. Not just the big picture matched (the two aspects of Purushottama when it's in generative mode, to the tattvas evolved), but even the tiny details (like the Shivatattva -> prathama spandana etc etc explicated in detail in Kashmiri Shaivam, which further clarified suspected connections to Quantum/Particle Physics) - everything seemed to be a perfect match. At a minimum, the Hindoo religion seemed to me to be a great means to visualise various pop-science materials on physics-cosmology that I was perusing, just like in the past I had used the latter to add to a further conceptual understanding of the former too. [Using models and analogies is a useful aid to understand other stuff, and even to try and reason about - or predict features of - said other stuff.]
However, by accident I came upon The Problem in what I had thus-far thought was this great "coincidence" of the beautiful match. Not coincidence - it implies ancient Hindus randomly guessed the right answer - I mean great confluence of independent views on cosmology. My assumption - and I eventually saw how foolish I was - had been that physics had independently confirmed the Hindoo understanding of the cosmological aspect of the universe and even of the current state and several of the possible future states of the universe.* True, physics had not confirmed - and even now just barely touched upon - that other unavoidable but intriguing phenomenon of our universe, one which Hindoo religion had dwelled upon in such detail: the nature and "origination" of consciousness, hence even of life in our universe. We're all informed that in the Hindu cosmological view (i.e. theistic, pre-classical, Vedic Sankhyam) initial *consciousness* generated matter/energy, instead of vice-versa. (And IIRC intermediate, lower-level stages of consciousness are further generative themselves, leading even to the senses - i.e. senses as products of some aspect of consciousness instead of the other way around* - while forms of matter like the 5 elements are but one of the final products "evolutes". * I personally think that consciousness leading to senses makes more sense than the inverse, but this is merely something that seems reasonable to me, not something I know proof of.) And, further, Hindoos are told about the nature of consciousness: the degree to which all individual consciousness-es are/aren't interconnected, and its (im)mortality and -uh- (im)mutability (for lack of a better term). [Specifically, that all individual/units of consciousness is connected in some way at the Purushottama-level (whether it is identical and the exact relationship to the purushottama is a question that has 3 varying views in Vedanta, but in all cases the origins are in puruShottama), that it is immortal and that it is immutable in an important sense. Immutable: in that very sense that units of consciousness are considered specifically Not immutable in Buddhism and where (i.e. in Buddhism) notions of immortality actually lose their meaning. My own conception is that immortality implies - logical implication operator - immutability (of essence), based on what I understand of established Hindoo arguments against Buddhist subversions/inversions on Atman.]
* Sagan had covered a limited view of the Hindu perception of the cosmos. I like Sagan but that bit always frustrated me because he was incomplete: he had a wealth of interconnected views in Hindu religion to mine from, but somehow only knew of the simplest interpretation of one of them. He left out the tattvas and the fact that Hindu religion does not necessarily require that it is the *same* universe that is recreated (or even one universe), but that the process of generation repeats and in fact can apply to any number of universes, not even necessarily in sequential succession. [And even the visualisation of Vishnu's bubbles and his giving life to each - once more by his being the father and his prakriti their mother, seeding them - and pervading each, lends well to a multiverse.] The Hindu cosmological view even works with the theory of the auto-merging of multiple similar universes: when any two such once-distinct temporarily-diverging strands collapse into identical futures, and hence represent one future/one universe from then on.
Even so, the limitation Sagan set on what the Hindu view must ("solely") be and have meant, is not entirely beyond possibility. E.g. Penrose (I think) is/was still seen arguing for some sort of continuation (but not involving a Big Crunch etc) in the form of a cyclical universe of sorts, using expansion a.o.t. inflation. Or something.
And alternatively, the predominant notion of a cooling death of the universe aeons from now, when the arrow of time no longer applies - and hence Time (in physics terms) ceases to exist - has counterparts in ancient Hindoo conception. The conception of Time as the ultimate destroyer of all things in the arena of manifestation - see Krishna in BG or Shiva as Mahakaala - and the notion that time itself comes to a close also, is already there in Hindoo scriptures. The end of the starry era is like the Kaalaagni (Shiva) and the end of the universe upon the gradual dissipation of all energy (practically no more light, as the stars were long since extinguished by that time) is evoked in Kaalaraatri (Uma).
Have wandered from the point. Back to The Shock/Disappointment, and why/how this all relates back to San's invocation to Heisenberg as an authority for external validation.
Where was I? Oh yes. I was always a bit disturbed by the fact that physics had threatened a limit on speed: apparently nothing in our particular universe could travel faster than the speed that light has in a vacuum (excepting, as per some other scientists, an infinite supply of energy - itself hard to come by). Or something. You know: the unforgiving law that limits our possibilities in disturbing ways. There are no laws worse than those that oppress, and this one clearly oppressed. Einstein had used this ceiling as his scary constant C in his oft-parroted formula. Since I approve of FTL in sci-fi and warp etc, it was natural to look for some scientific validation. (Absolute physical laws must be militated against and overturned when they stand in the way of good sci-fi: can't let plausible sci-fi turn into impossible fantasy, since it's a totally different genre.)
And indeed, there exist several fields of physics that run counter to a particular dominant paradigm in Physics, and one or more of which fields even propose other things about Speed. (Which actually led to another shock from which I have still not recovered.) People listed promising sounding stuff like Black-Hole Thermodynamics (don't ask me) and Loop Quantum Gravity. I think it was the latter that proposed that at the start of the universe light had a different speed in a vacuum, i.e. the value of the so-called lightspeed constant was different. In fact, this was part of a larger more earth-shattering assumption in this model of the universe: that time itself changes the laws of physics. That formulas which held true during the start of the universe need not necessarily be assumed to hold now or those that hold now need not hold in a later stage of our universe. (Blew my brain. Especially the repercussions.)
Anyway, the second-mentioned shock was that there was a lot of discord and *seriously* ugly bickering in physics, with mathematicians and some theoretical physicists huddling on String Theory's side [because it hasn't said anything to deny Quantum Mechanics], whereas other physicists - including theoretical and especially more practical ones - felt that the mathematicians (or mathematics) had hijacked physics, crowned their field the king/final arbiter, and continued physics on in a purely theoretical realm of just maths [what people have called Mathematical Platonism] as opposed to defining the physical universe we can observe (i.e. physics, *replaced* by maths). The latter's argument included that maths had led to the envisioning of all sorts of unverifiable things, such as multiple universes that we can't detect and possibly never can, while not being required to offer proof, all because the maths worked out (even if every now and then another extra variable or constant needed to be introduced into formulas to make them conform). Then mathematicians came out with more pop-science/pop-maths books - on "the beautiful mathematical universe" etc - which only reinforced the notion that "since the maths worked out", it "must therefore" be true/apply in our universe, though such a conclusion is actually founded on the assumption that the universe is made of maths, as opposed to us merely being able to model various properties/features of the universe using maths. That is, the distinction is: the universe IS mathematical from the ground up, versus that WE (us humans) can try to *understand* our universe using mathematical models. Note how the last says nothing about the objective universe itself *being* mathematical, just that our observed measurements of said universe is that its behaviour and phenomena conforms to various mathematical rules. Physics is merely the science on the *actual* nature of our universe and all things in it, and some of the physicists were pleading to go back to the good old days of experimenting and verifying, as opposed to continue to theorise often with no hope of uninfluenced verification and spin theories from theories. Such detractors from the current state of physics in the last decades were arguing that mathematicians who have runaway with their theories are increasingly coming up with maths that is internally consistent to other theoretical maths, and who then expect the *universe* to continue conforming to such increasingly-extreme maths, merely because it all makes mathematical sense to the theorists. Maybe I'm being confusing: there is the real, objective universe. And there is the mathematical modelling of the universe by humans. Mathematicians keep developing on their model - often moving past what is experimentally verifiable - and expect the objective universe to conform to what is increasingly taking place in the mathematical la-la-land of pure theory. Now I'm just repeating myself again.
Anyway, a large part of the disgruntled side's argumentation was against string theory. Physicists in other fields of physics, like Hawking (theoretical physics and cosmologist with special focus on black holes) and several famous Particle Physicists etc [I think Cox was accused], are still supporters thereof, as being a reasonable theory that at least doesn't contradict anything in other physics, even though that last in itself means nothing. While other mathematicians (like IIRC Penrose) and physicists (like that famous guy, oh dear, can't remember his name, starts with an F) are not fans of String theory. [After the Higgs-Boson results, String Theorists for some reason felt that it vindicated their field, when really, it only validated QM. Which was already validated, I thought?]
The detractors' problem is that string theory is not falsifiable, or hasn't been so far, and that it's wasted too much time that could be spent on physics that *does* show results. As those mocking String Theory explained: it ultimately also renders void Hawking's decent argument for why a god-entity is not a necessary presupposition to explain the birth of our or any universe, and hence, that gods need not exist. [Of course, this does not prove that Gods don't exist: only that the *christian* gawd has no reason to exist and that modern christian claims to the biblical gawd creating the universe is false, though really, the original christian claims were only ever about earth and visible bodies and all the "let there be light" type stuff, echoes with variation in the koran too. Besides, not all views that entertain Gods argue that Gods were to have *created* the materia of the cosmos, some merely propose that the Gods ordered this existing materia/particulate matter and were coeval with it.] So the sarcastic response was that since there was an infinite number of universes as per various String Theories, and as per the nth (4th?) stage of the mathematical development on a String Theory which argues that "anything is ultimately possible and therefore is ultimately true in some universe out there", that this would logically mean that "there must be at least one universe out there were some gods exist" (<- note, lowercased and pluralised, just as in the atheist responses to the extravagances indulged in by extreme String Theorising). They thereby showed that String Theory in a larger sense ends up undermining Hawking type arguments for no Gods, and that with the more extreme developments in String Theory all kinds of absurd things could be argued for instead and that science should guard itself against that by not getting carried away.
Of course, that's not to say that multiple universes don't exist - the supposition of multiple universes is not just a side-effect of String theory, but also of some other physics fields which do have lots of validation - just that the mathematicians have got out of hand with their theorising in purely-theoretical-La-la-land. I should really find some of those entertaining quotes that made me want to read some dissenting books for the shock-value. Those quotes were really funny and disturbing at the same time.
Back to "loop quantum gravity" which had seemed promising, since one could perhaps still argue for FTL in sci-fi that way. It led me to reading reviews for books on this or related topics by one of the dissenting (physicist) authors, in order to decide on whether I should give the work itself a go. That's when I encountered the first and primary Shock that is relevant to this post. In short: turns out that much of modern physics is "inspired" - at times directly and at other times indirectly - by Vedanta. In the former case, even the direction of inquiry and development was influenced by Vedanta. I'll track down the first quote, the rest of the matter people can look up for themselves. And so the point is that physicist Heisenbug (just kidding) Heisenberg being in total agreement or in any agreement with Hindu cosmological views and constituents does NOT make for independent proof of validity for Hindu religion. It is circular reasoning within a closed system: Vedic ideas including vedanta formatively influenced modern physics; modern physicists finding that notions from Vedic religion coincide with modern physics is therefore circular. They're not two independent systems showing independent confluence, because one is actually dependent on the other.
Here, with some context.
Quote:Unspinning the web of hubris - an honest view of theoretical physics, 16 Mar 2007
By Mr Sutapas Bhattacharya
[...]
Smolin recognises that the fact that String "theories" assume a particular Space-Time background rather than attempt to explain the emergence of Space-Time from a deeper quantum reality means that background-dependent string "theories" cannot be the final or ultimate theories.
Smolin refers to "seers" and "craftspeople" in regard to the philosophically-minded questioners and the glorified technicians of mainstream science. Smolin, now free to work on the foundations of QT at a new institute funded by a wealthy patron, lists the philosophically-minded founders of QT such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger amongst his heroes. However, unlike them he remains a realist assuming that physical theories can actually apprehend Reality as it is. As part of the philosophical questioning necessary to re-examine near-universal assumptions, Smolin fails to recognise the errors in Galileo's notion of primary and secondary qualities. As Schrodinger and Husserl etc. recognised, primary measurable qualities actually presuppose a conscious observer to determine them. Thus Galileo began the "despiritualization" of Nature by abstraction of measurable quantities.
Whereas Smolin points to the Cartesian representation of Time as a frozen dimension as possibly the big mistaken assumption of physics, the likes of Heisenberg and Schrodinger were far more philosophically profound than would-be "seer" Smolin. So too was David Bohm whom Smolin's greatest hero Einstein befriended at Princeton. Smolin would do well to ask why Schrodinger was an advocate of Vedanta (Brahmanism), why Heisenberg said that Indian philosophy subconsciously influenced his physics ideas, why Bohm was a friend of Krishnamurti, and Pauli with Carl Jung. As Heisenberg said, it came as a great help to him to discover than an entire civilisation already subscribed to a view that resembled that of the new Quantum Mechanics which had so shocked the Western Mind (from Capra: Uncommon Wisdom). Heisenberg even checked the chapter on QM in "The Philosophy of Space and Time and the Inner Constitution of Nature" by mathematical physicist and Sanskrit-literate mystic Michael Whiteman in which Whiteman argued for a Universal Consciousness. All these mathematical theories simply explore the realm of possibilities or archetypes well known to mystics. The true Reality lies beyond such ideational realms in the distinctionless Ground of Universal Consciousness whose energetic vibrations manifest the phenomenal universe. Physics cannot even account for the most basic fact of our existence, our consciousness!
(No no. Future modern-western "philosophers" will plagiarise from Hindus' Vedic religion's explanation of the origination and nature of consciousness, and then physics will build on *that* and then everyone will declare the conclusions to be "a great western science/scientific discovery" again. Who's betting?
Actually, Sagan wasn't the only one interested in dissecting the parts of the mind to get at the origins of its working, though he didn't push the matter. And more recently, Penrose already penned (haha) an article as part of a compendium of articles on consciousness and Quantum Physics, where other contributors included physicists like Subhash Kak and other mathematicians. Physicists pondering consciousness in greater depth than just dissecting the evolutionary formation of the animal/human mind was bound to happen: I think the '(interfering) observer effect' noticed at the quantum level is what prompted deeper western scientific scrutiny into the larger matter of "consciousness".
Even now, the sensationalist New Scientist is still agog with how philosophy must rescue physics yet again, by "somehow" explaining the observer effect in a scientifically-inoffensive way.
Though IIRC Hawking has declared "philosophy" dead. And meanwhile, Penrose is IIRC famous for declaring that AI will never approach the mind. Though some AI-ists vehemently disagree, as they must. I hate uncertainty and who knew that physics and maths was permeated by it. Another shock.)
To repeat my actual point, since I drowned it in a whole lot of other stuff that no one asked for: the fact that so many uh founding fathers of modern physics (quantum physics and its spin-offs) tend to have been directly or indirectly influenced in their contemplations->formulations by Vedanta/Vedic religion makes the comparison unfair. That is, it is NOT independent confirmation of Vedanta to find that either modern physics agrees beautifully with it or that physicists upholding modern physics should find themselves in agreement with it.
It is merely that the seeds of thought behind modern physics - in the form of small to significant impetus here and there - is so obscured that, forgetting Vedanta's influence in inspiring the direction of inquiry and in formulating starting assumptions (and even desired conclusions) in modern physics, people find it all a great vindication. That's not to say that the cosmology as revealed by Vedic religion is *wrong*, or even that modern physics is wrong. Not at all. Am saying that holding up Heisenberg's tendency to agree to aspects of Hindoo religion is neither here nor there since his field has been too/unduly influenced by the same to count as any external/independent confirmation at all.
So, after this discovery, I stopped making comparisons between Hindoo cosmology and Physics-cosmology, since it wasn't a fair test. Sigh.
Tracked down the morbidly hilarious comments I'd seen in reviews (fortunately, had emailed these to a relative):
Quote:Currently, string theory is the leading paradigm in physics. But its research programme has found no grounding in experimental results or mathematical formulation. As one of its pioneers, Daniel Friedan, later wrote, "String theory cannot give any definite explanations of existing knowledge of the real world and cannot make any definite predictions. The reliability of string theory cannot be evaluated, much less established. String theory has no credibility as a candidate theory of physics." Smolin writes, "the existence of a population of other universes is a hypothesis that cannot be confirmed by direct observation; hence, it cannot be used in an explanatory fashion."
Quote:Perhaps the beginnings of trouble for particle physics began in May, 1963 when P.A.M. Dirac famously said "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." (p. 195) This view, shared in some respects by Einstein, is the source of the problem today.That is just disturbing.