'One of the most extraordinary and exciting things about modern physics is the way the microscopic world of quantum mechanics challenges our commonsense understanding. The facts that light can be seen as either a particle or a wave, and that the uncertainty principle tells us we can never know at the same time what an electron does and where it is, and the quantum notion of superposition all suggest an entirely different way of understanding the world from that of classical physics, in which objects behave in a deterministic and predictable manner…
'To a Mahayana Buddhist exposed to Nagarjuna’s thought, there is an unmistakable resonance between the notion of emptiness and the new physics. If on the quantum level, matter is revealed to be less solid and definable than it appears, then it seems to me that science is coming closer to the Buddhist contemplative insights of emptiness and interdependence. At a conference in New Delhi, I once heard Raja Ramanan, the physicist known to his colleagues as the Indian Sakharov, drawing parallels between Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness and quantum mechanics… When one puts the world under a serious lens of investigation—be it the scientific method and experiment or the Buddhist logic of emptiness or the contemplative method of meditative analysis—one finds things are more subtle than, and in some cases even contradict, the assumptions of our ordinary commonsense view of the world.'
- His Holiness The Dalai Lama, from his book, 'The Universe in a Single Atom.'
'To a Mahayana Buddhist exposed to Nagarjuna’s thought, there is an unmistakable resonance between the notion of emptiness and the new physics. If on the quantum level, matter is revealed to be less solid and definable than it appears, then it seems to me that science is coming closer to the Buddhist contemplative insights of emptiness and interdependence. At a conference in New Delhi, I once heard Raja Ramanan, the physicist known to his colleagues as the Indian Sakharov, drawing parallels between Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness and quantum mechanics… When one puts the world under a serious lens of investigation—be it the scientific method and experiment or the Buddhist logic of emptiness or the contemplative method of meditative analysis—one finds things are more subtle than, and in some cases even contradict, the assumptions of our ordinary commonsense view of the world.'
- His Holiness The Dalai Lama, from his book, 'The Universe in a Single Atom.'