The Universe in a Single Atom

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REFLECTION

I have spent many years reflecting on the remarkable advances of science. Within the short space of my own lifetime, the impact of science and technology on humanity has been tremendous. Although my own interest in science began with curiosity about a world, foreign to me at that time, governed by technology, it was not very long before the colossal significance of science for humanity as a whole dawned on me--especially after I came into exile in 1959. There is almost no area of human life today that is not touched by the effects of science and technology. Yet are we clear about the place of science in the totality of human life--what exactly it should do and by what it should be governed? This last point is critical because unless the direction of science is guided by a consciously ethical motivation, especially compassion, its effects may fail to bring benefit. They may indeed cause great harm.

Seeing the tremendous importance of science and recognizing its inevitable dominance in the modern world fundamentally changed my attitude to it from curiosity to a kind of urgent engagement. In Buddhism the highest spiritual ideal is to cultivate compassion for all sentient beings and to work for their welfare to the greatest possible extent. From my earliest childhood I have been conditioned to cherish this ideal and attempt to fulfill it in my every action. So I wanted to understand science because it gave me a new area to explore in my personal quest to understand the nature of reality. I also wanted to learn about it because I recognized in it a compelling way to communicate insights gleaned from my own spiritual tradition. So, for me, the need to engage with this powerful force in our world has become a kind of spiritual injunction as well. The central question--central for the survival and well-being of our world--is how we can make the wonderful developments of science into something that offers altruistic and compassionate service for the needs of humanity and the other sentient beings with whom we share this earth.

Do ethics have a place in science? I believe they do. First of all, like any instrument, science can be put to good use or bad. It is the state of mind of the person wielding the instrument that determines to what end it will be put. Second, scientific discoveries affect the way we understand the world and our place in it. This has consequences for our behavior. For example, the mechanistic understanding of the world led to the Industrial Revolution, in which the exploitation of nature became the standard practice. There is, however, a general assumption that ethics are relevant to only the application of science, not the actual pursuit of science. In this model the scientist as an individual and the community of scientists in general occupy a morally neutral position, with no responsibility for the fruits of what they have discovered. But many important scientific discoveries, and particularly the technological innovations they lead to, create new conditions and open up new possibilities which give rise to new ethical and spiritual challenges. We cannot simply absolve the scientific enterprise and individual scientists from responsibility for contributing to the emergence of a new reality.

Perhaps the most important point is to ensure that science never becomes divorced from the basic human feeling of empathy with our fellow beings. Just as one's fingers can function only in relation to the palm, so scientists must remain aware of their connection to society at large. Science is vitally important, but it is only one finger of the hand of humanity, and its greatest potential can be actualized only so long as we are careful to remember this. Otherwise, we risk losing our sense of priorities. Humanity may end up serving the interests of scientific progress rather than the other way around. Science and technology are powerful tools, but we must decide how best to use them. What matters above all is the motivation that governs the use of science and technology, in which ideally heart and mind are united.

For me, science is first and foremost an empirical discipline that provides humanity with a powerful access to understanding the nature of the physical and living world. It is essentially a mode of inquiry that gives us fantastically detailed knowledge of the empirical world and the underlying laws of nature, which we infer from the empirical data. Science proceeds by means of a very specific method that involves measurement, quantification, and intersubjective verification through repeatable experiments. This, at least, is the nature of scientific method as it exists within the current paradigm. Within this model, many aspects of human existence, including values, creativity, and spirituality, as well as deeper metaphysical questions, lie outside the scope of scientific inquiry.

Though there are areas of life and knowledge outside the domain of science, I have noticed that many people hold an assumption that the scientific view of the world should be the basis for all knowledge and all that is knowable. This is scientific materialism. Although I am not aware of a school of thought that explicitly propounds this notion, it seems to be a common unexamined presupposition. This view upholds a belief in an objective world, independent of the contingency of its observers. It assumes that the data being analyzed within an experiment are independent of the preconceptions, perceptions, and experience of the scientist analyzing them.

Underlying this view is the assumption that, in the final analysis, matter, as it can be described by physics and as it is governed by the laws of physics, is all there is. Accordingly, this view would uphold that psychology can be reduced to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. My concern here is not so much to argue against this reductionist position (although I myself do not share it) but to draw attention to a vitally important point: that these ideas do not constitute scientific knowledge; rather they represent a philosophical, in fact a metaphysical, position. The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.

One of the principal problems with a radical scientific materialism is the narrowness of vision that results and the potential for nihilism that might ensue. Nihilism, materialism, and reductionism are above all problems from a philosophical and especially a human perspective, since they can potentially impoverish the way we see ourselves. For example, whether we see ourselves as random biological creatures or as special beings endowed with the dimension of consciousness and moral capacity will make an impact on how we feel about ourselves and treat others. In this view many dimensions of the full reality of what it is to be human--art, ethics, spirituality, goodness, beauty, and above all, consciousness--either are reduced to the chemical reactions of firing neurons or are seen as a matter of purely imaginary constructs. The danger then is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.

It is difficult to see how questions such as the meaning of life or good and evil can be accommodated within such a worldview. The problem is not with the empirical data of science but with the contention that these data alone constitute the legitimate ground for developing a comprehensive worldview or an adequate means for responding to the world's problems. There is more to human existence and to reality itself than current science can ever give us access to.

By the same token, spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science. If as spiritual practitioners we ignore the discoveries of science, our practice is also impoverished, as this mind-set can lead to fundamentalism. This is one of the reasons I encourage my Buddhist colleagues to undertake the study of science, so that its insights can be integrated into the Buddhist worldview.


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ENCOUNTER WITH SCIENCE

I was born into a family of simple farmers who used cattle to plow their field and, when the barley was harvested, used cattle to trample the grain out of the husk. Perhaps the only objects that could be described as technological in the world of my early childhood were the rifles that local warrior nomads had probably acquired from British India, Russia, or China. At the age of six I was enthroned as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and embarked upon an education in all aspects of Buddhism. I had personal tutors who gave me daily classes in reading, writing, basic Buddhist philosophy, and the memorization of scriptures and rituals. I was also given several tsenshap, which literally means "philosophical assistants." Their primary job was to engage me in debate on issues of Buddhist thought. In addition, I would participate in long hours of prayers and meditative contemplation. I spent periods in retreat with my tutors and sat regularly for two hours at a time four times a day in a meditation session. This is a fairly typical training for a high lama in the Tibetan tradition. But I was not educated in math, geology, chemistry, biology, or physics. I did not even know they existed.

The Potala Palace was my official winter residence. It is a huge edifice, occupying the entire side of a mountain, and is supposed to have a thousand rooms--I never counted them myself. In my spare moments as a boy, I amused myself by exploring some of its chambers. It was like being on a perpetual treasure hunt. There were all kinds of things, mainly the belongings of former Dalai Lamas and especially of my immediate predecessor, preserved there. Among the most striking of the palace's contents were the reliquary stupas containing the remains of the previous Dalai Lamas, reaching back to the Fifth, who lived in the seventeenth century and enlarged the Potala to its present form. Amid the assorted oddities I found lying about were some mechanical objects which belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Most notable were a collapsible telescope made from brass, which could be attached to a tripod, and a hand-wound mechanical timepiece with a rotating globe on a stand that gave the time in different time zones. There was also a large stash of illustrated books in English telling the story of the First World War.

Some of these were gifts to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama from his friend Sir Charles Bell. Bell was the Tibetan-speaking British political officer in Sikkim. He had been the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's host during his brief sojourn in British India when he fled in 1910 at the threat of invasion by the armies of the last imperial government of China. It is curious that exile in India and the discovery of scientific culture are things bequeathed to me by my most immediate predecessor. For the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, as I later found out, this stay in British India was an eye-opening experience, which led to a recognition of the need for major social and political reforms in Tibet. On his return to Lhasa, he introduced the telegraph, set up a postal service, built a small generating plant to power Tibet's first electric lights, and established a mint for the national coinage and the printing of paper currency. He also came to appreciate the importance of a modern, secular education and sent a select group of Tibetan children to study at Rugby School in England. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama left a remarkable deathbed testament, which predicted much of the political tragedy to come and which the government that succeeded him failed to understand fully or to heed.

Among the other items of mechanical interest acquired by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama were a pocket watch, two film projectors, and three motorcars--two Baby Austins from 1927 and a 1931 American Dodge. As there were no drivable roads across the Himalayas or in Tibet itself, these cars had to be disassembled in India and carried across the mountains by porters, mules, and donkeys before being put back together again for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. For a long time these were the only three automobiles in all Tibet--and pretty useless they were, since there were no roads outside Lhasa on which one could drive them. These various items, the telltale signs of a technological culture, exercised great fascination on a naturally curious and somewhat restless boy. There was a time, I remember very clearly, when I would rather fiddle with these objects than study philosophy or memorize a text. Today I can see that these things were in themselves no more than toys, but they hinted at a whole universe of experience and knowledge to which I had no access and whose existence was endlessly tantalizing. In a way, this book is about the path to discovering that world and the wonderful things it has to offer.

I did not find the telescope a problem. Somehow it was quite obvious to me what it was for, and I was soon using it to observe the bustling life of Lhasa town, especially the marketplaces. I envied the sense of abandon with which children of my age could run about in the streets while I had to study. Later I used the telescope to peer into the night sky above the Potala--which offers, in the high altitude of Tibet, one of the most spectacular views of the stars. I asked my attendants the names of the stars and constellations.

I knew what the pocket watch was for but was much more intrigued by how it worked. I puzzled over this for some time, until curiosity got the better of me and I opened up the case to look inside. Soon I had dismantled the entire item, and the challenge was to put it back together again so that it actually worked. Thus began what was to become a lifelong hobby of dismantling and reassembling mechanical objects. I mastered this process well enough to become the principal repairer for a number of the people I knew who owned watches or clocks in Lhasa. In India later on, I did not have much luck with my cuckoo clock, whose poor cuckoo got attacked by my cat and never recovered. When the automatic battery watch became common, my hobby got much less interesting--if you open one of these, you find hardly any mechanism at all.

Figuring out how to use the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's two hand-cranked film projectors was much more complicated. One of my attendants, an ethnic Chinese monk, worked out how to make one of them function. I asked him to set it up so that I could watch the very few films we had. Later we got hold of a sixteen-millimeter electrically powered projector, but it kept breaking down, partly because the generator which powered it was faulty. Around this time, I guess in 1945, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, Austrians who had escaped over the Himalayas from a British prisoner of war camp in northern India, arrived in Lhasa. Harrer became a friend of mine, and I would occasionally turn to him to help fix the projector. We could not get many films, but numerous newsreels of the great events of the Second World War made it across from India, giving the story from an Allied perspective. There were also reels of VE Day, of the coronation of King George VI of England and Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V, as well as some of Charlie Chaplin's silent movies.