Monday, August 31, 2009

Physics and Buddhism: The space between

Text: Christian Thomas Kohl (Special to WQ on Buddhism and Quantum Physics)

The Space Between Two Things
Abstract - Rudyard Kipling, the famous Indian-born British author, wrote in The Jungle Book: "Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." In this study I show that Kipling was not completely right: There is common ground between Eastern Buddhist philosophy and Western quantum physics. There is, in fact, a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nagarjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core reality. Rather, reality consists of systems of interacting objects. But such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic, or instrumentalistic concepts of reality that underlie modern modes of thought. More>>