We had two lovely guests over on New Years afternoon, in the rain, to visit in front of a roaring crackling fire. Few things in the world are as wonderful as great conversation.
One subject that came up was What the Bleep Do We Know!? – a movie, apparently about a woman’s life coming unraveled and a chorus of scientists and gurus commenting on the meaning of what’s going on with the woman. The scientists and gurus, in the movie, are in agreement.
I don’t plan to see the movie. The premise is wrong. I went down that fallacious path myself decades ago, introducing quantum physicists to Zen gurus and listening to their conversations.
The best way to understand the fallacy of any dialog between science, religion and philosophy is to picture two rows of great thinkers in their field talking to each other.
On one side you have a dozen gurus including the Dalai Lama. On the other side you have a dozen prominent and Nobel winning physicists including Steven Hawking. They can talk for an hour or five days, it doesn’t matter.
Nothing about the guru’s positions will be changed by anything they hear from the scientists and absolutely nothing in the scientist’s position will be changed by what they hear from the gurus. Neither system learns from a dialog with the other because neither system has anything to do with the other.
Only people listening might think that parallel observations from both groups creates some truth-value. But, of course it doesn’t since the scientist can be expected to say something very different in fifty years.
The scientists are reporting experiments, the gurus are explaining their historic texts.
An aside is worthwhile in this blog. What the scientists have to say on the issue of quantum mechanics has a long history.
Take a piece of paper, put a pinhole in it and focus the light from the sun, through the pinhole, on another piece of white paper. You will see a circle of white light with rainbows around the edge. Now put another pinhole in the paper an inch away. You now get two circles of light that slightly overlap and in the overlap there are fuzzy lines of wave interference.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens used this experiment to argue whether light traveled as waves or particles.
Quantum mechanics can show that light is both. The quantum explanation of waves and particles is the whole premise of movie discussions about physics and religion.
What has the simple experiment, you can do while reading this blog, got to do with anything in religion or philosophy?