Well said, this is the spirit that started this blog

http://buddhism.about.com/b/2009/02/14/buddhism-and-quantum-physics.htm

The Physicist there, Adam Frank is frank about quantum physics. Whenever I see this like http://spiritual-minds.com/articles/Buddhism%20and%20Quantum%20Physics.htm
or
http://www.quantumbuddhism.com/qb-newindex.php

I have the feeling that it's taking it too far and too fast.

As highlighted in here: http://physicsandbuddhism.blogspot.sg/2012/09/karma-quantum-interpretations-bells.html and here: http://physicsandbuddhism.blogspot.sg/p/about.html,

Even the Dalai Lama has the same sentiments about the reluctance to accept fundamental randomness. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/1998/aug/07/talking-physics-with-the-dalai-lama

We should be cautious whenever we venture into the realm of Science and Religion.  as said by Prof. Frank, "...popular belief that quantum physics theories confirm Buddhist teachings. This is a mistaken view..."

Let's not get attached to Physics and Buddhism, merely using this encounter to shed light on both subjects too. And to increase faith for those in need.

Karma-Quantum Interpretations-Bell's inequality

I'm thinking that I'll make short (ok, sorry, it's long for a blog post but short for the topic...) but more frequent post rather than wait for a well thought out parallels to come into my mind before writing these. These are kinda incomplete and thus unsatisfactory, so sorry!

Karma as according to the Buddhist interpretation, means that there is a cause and effect. Having a cause is not trivial. It means that things does not happen coincidentally, there is no randomness.

However, the Law of Karma is not deterministic either, there is some amount of choice that is possible. So the world that we live in is not totally random (chaos) not is it totally deterministic (total order). It is kinda like complexity theory. 

Well, this analogy is clear in our everyday life. We see things happen, we see there is a cause, by experience we know we have choices, sometimes, if we think out of the box, our choices seems unlimited. Just that sometimes, by classical ignorance we don't know all the causes, so when we meet our friend while we were out shopping alone, bham! Coincidence, we say. But is it really? 

We say that because we think with the centre of the universe to be ourselves. I know why I came to the shop at this particular time and place. And I know this friend there who I meet once a week in some class we take together. I didn't know he lives there and have some particular reason to come shopping at this particular time and place. 

His side of the picture is similar, most of us think: add these seemingly unrelated causes together and we get unexpected outcomes, it doesn't count as an effect. So it's random. By chance. However, if we de localize from ourselves, think in terms of full knowledge, we would not find it strange to bump into them. Whether we should add in a term that says, it's because of past karma that we are together in such and such place and situation that we would recognise each other when we meet again. I dunno. It's up to you. For me, it's the class we take together (we meet strangers all the time, the class give the condition for recognition) plus non-expectation due to incomplete knowledge that made the surprise meeting seems so special. To add in things like I must have known you in a past life, or God put us on collision course is not really helpful. 

Buddhism part done. Now for the Physics part.

Quantum Physics, commonly used to support the strange minds we have. Commonly misused. Too commonly. Why? Well for starters, what we call quantum physics is just a bunch of mathematics that can predict and explain the exact thing we see in experiments. Not just experiments, the very fact that transistors can be so small thus providing all the PC and mobile phone advances is due to quantum physics. So it's true. At least the maths is true so far. The Physical interpretation however, is insanely a lot.

From wikipedia (Might be wrong, as anyone can edit it, I've not checked it to be true yet too):

Interpretation	Author(s)	Deterministic?	Wavefunction real?	Unique history?	Hidden variables?	Collapsing wavefunctions?	Observer role?	Local?	Counterfactual definiteness?
Ensemble interpretation	Max Born, 1926	Agnostic	No	Yes	Agnostic	No	None	No	No
Copenhagen interpretation	Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, 1927	No	No1	Yes	No	Yes2	None	No	No
de Broglie–Bohm theory	Louis de Broglie, 1927, David Bohm, 1952	Yes	Yes3	Yes4	Yes	No	None	No	Yes
von Neumann interpretation	von Neumann, 1932, Wheeler, Wigner	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Causal	No	No
Quantum logic	Garrett Birkhoff, 1936	Agnostic	Agnostic	Yes5	No	No	Interpretational6	Agnostic	No
Many-worlds interpretation	Hugh Everett, 1957	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	None	Yes	No
Popper's interpretation[37]	Karl Popper, 1957[38]	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	None	Yes	Yes13
Time-symmetric theories	Yakir Aharonov, 1964	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
Stochastic interpretation	Edward Nelson, 1966	No	No	Yes	No	No	None	No	No
Many-minds interpretation	H. Dieter Zeh, 1970	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Interpretational7	Yes	No
Consistent histories	Robert B. Griffiths, 1984	Agnostic8	Agnostic8	No	No	No	Interpretational6	Yes	No
Objective collapse theories	Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber, 1986, Penrose interpretation, 1989	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	None	No	No
Transactional interpretation	John G. Cramer, 1986	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes9	None	No	Yes14
Relational interpretation	Carlo Rovelli, 1994	No	No	Agnostic10	No	Yes11	Intrinsic12	Yes	No

There are at least 14 different interpretations. 

And I'm still reading up on some of it, so I can't give a one by one analysis of which interpretation is compatible with Buddhist Philosophy, or even give a parallel comparison. So here's just a brief one, the one I want to talk about is Bell's inequality. 

From the table that says deterministic? There are 4 yes, 7 no, and 3 agnostic. What it means is does the interpretation says there is intrinsic randomness in nature? The 7 "no deterministic" says there is intrinsic randomness. The 4 "yes deterministic" says we can recover classical beauty of deterministic world (which has caused some to believe we don't have free will) by this interpretation. The 3 "agnostic", I don't even know. Where's the middle path between order and chaos? Or is this making it too simple? Maybe the intrinsic randomness is required as a mechanism for free will to appear. I know too little right now to say more.

So let's go to more solid ground: Bell's inequality. Inspired by the intention to resolve one of the most famous interpretation clashes in quantum physics, (EPR paradox) this inequality was thought out and then experiments were tested. The violation of the inequality which is observed in experiments says something fundamental about our world. So even if there is another theory that replaces quantum later on, it also has to explain the violation of Bell's inequality. It's a fundamental aspect of our nature.

It is made to test one thing: quantum entanglement. In the quantum world, things do not have a definite value until it is measured (as per the conventional interpretation), when measured it has certain probability to appear as different outcomes, and we only see one. Measuring the same thing again and again, we get the statistics to verify the case of it's state. So it is intrinsically random, no hidden process to determine which values will appear for the same measurement. Einstein's view is that there is an intrinsic thing that is hidden away from us and therefore quantum physics is not complete, Bohr's view is that quantum physics is complete, so there is intrinsic randomness. Having not known how to test for hidden variables, it became an interpretation argument, not of interest to most physicist then.

Two particles which are entangled are such that the two particles will give correlated (or anti-correlated) results when measured using the same measurements. Yet according to Bohr, the two particles has no intrinsic agreed upon values before the measurement, according to Einstein, they have! How to test it?

To make it more explicit and it's really simple maths, here's the CHSH inequality:

The system is that we have two parties: Alice and Bob. Or in Buddhist terms we can have an Arahant and a Bhikkhu. We ask them one of two different "yes-no" questions each day. Like "Blue or not?" and "Red or not?" (random questions, with no true-false value, since they can't lie and we need both yes-no answers) They can meet up and agree upon a strategy, then each are separated by a large distance or anyway we restrict them not to communicate with each other, not even mind-reading. They each give one of two answers to each questions, and we ask them often (easier with particles and light). Then we take their answers, collect them and they must satisfy this CHSH inequality.

Here's a bit more rigorous labelling. The two parties are \(A\) and \(B\). The two questions are \(A_{x} \text{ or } B_{y}\text{ with } \{x , y\}\in \{0,1\}\) where 0 and 1 represents the two questions and \( \{a_{x} \text{ or } b_{y}\} \in \{-1,1\}\) as the two possible answers, -1 representing no, 1 representing yes.

So we have the term: \( a_{0}(b_{0}+b_{1})+a_{1}(b_0-b_1)=\pm 2\). This is self evident, please substitute in the values to verify yourself. Note: in case you still don't get the notation, \(a_0\) denotes the answer when we ask the Arahant the first question \(a_1\) for the second question, it can be -1 or 1, and so on for \(b\)...

Of course, in one day of asking the question, we cannot get that term, we need to ask lots of times (with particles and light, it's much faster than one day per data), and average over it, so it's more of the average is bounded by this inequality. \(|S| =|<a_{0}b_{0}>+<a_0 b_{1}>+<a_{1}b_0>-<a_1 b_1>|\leq 2\) It's called the CHSH inequality, a type of Bell's inequality.

It seems that the inequality is obvious and cannot ever be violated, and it's trivial. Yet it was violated by entangled particles! We have skipped some few assumptions to arrive at the CHSH inequality, and here they are. The value for \(S\) must be less than 2 if we have 3 assumptions: (from my lecture notes in Quantum Measurement and Statistics)

1.  There is outcome independence (or possibility of determinism) this is saying that there can be a more elementary process such that the outcomes of \(A\) and \(B\) are independent, such as the pre agreed upon strategy. Or saying that one parties' answer should be independent of the other's answer. 
2. Parameter independence (or no signalling), that is the answer of one party is independent of the question I ask the other party. This is enforced by the no-communication between two parties (too far apart and so on...) Special relativity can be made to protect this assumption.
3. Measurement independence (or free will), that is whatever fundamental physical process (or the choice of which strategies to use) that gives the output, cannot depend on the choice of questions I give. (especially if the strategy is agreed upon before I even know which questions to ask.) Lacking this, a God may control everything such that I'm not free to choose the measurements, just that I think I am free, so the violation can occur.

All three are perfectly reasonable in any classical system.

1. The Arahant and Bhikkhu can list down say yes or no if asked this question or that... and made a long list, eg. I'll answer yes to question 1 for 3 times then no 4 times and then yes 2 times etc...you'll answer..... and it is deterministic.
2. They are not allowed to communicate, or we can separate them so far that light has no time to travel between the asking of the question and answering for both parties. This is thus protected by Special relativity. (If faster than light communication is possible, then time travel would also be possible.)
3. I'm free to ask any questions. (Some amount of free will).

Violation of Bell's inequality says that either one of the 3 above must be wrong.

1. Most physicist says this is wrong, there is intrinsic randomness in nature.
2. There are theories with this wrong, deterministic in nature, but since the signalling is hidden, no time travel or faster than light that we can use. Quite problematic and challenges Special relativity, not popular but still possible based on the violation of Bell's inequality alone.
3. And if people vote for this wrong, there is no point to science, life and the universe. 

Phew, quite a lot for the Physics part, didn't really intended to make it so long. Well, what does karma says about this?

From a superficial look, it seems that 1 and 3 must be wrong, leaving us to think that Buddhism says  de Broglie–Bohm theory  (or the variants there) is right! 

However, that theory is still deterministic, and so to have the middle path between deterministic world and total randomness, we have two choices. Either to assert that free will comes with the mind somewhere when physics develops to biology develops to explain the neuroscience of the brain and therefore mind, humans and beings with mind have free will but others are deterministic, fundamentally.

Or to accept randomness from the start, with decoherence (transition into classical realm where classical deterministic world is the norm) with phenomena like radioactive decay remaining the quantum randomness that we can see. And one of these phenomena is using quantum to describe free will of the mind, some failure to do that by people... but this is a bit out of the usual experiences is it not? If our choices are totally random, we would be doomed from the start right? eating, drinking, not eating for days etc... but maybe our choices are like wavefunctions, with certain probability for each, and with each new out of the box idea, comes a new weightage for the choice and only when decision has to be made is the measurement that collapses the system into a single outcome be made? Or does the process of measurement is just shifting the weightage to one outcome?

Too many questions, too little answers, I've not think this through yet, so no idea for now!

Humility

As the knowledge of Dharma grows within one self, should one be more humble or would one be more egoistic? If one gets egoistic, showing off the knowledge and qualifications of the Dharma to all, "I have such and such Diplomas, Bachelors, Masters, PhD. in such and such University of Buddhism..." one has only gained a bookish understanding of the Dharma. And this is not what the Dharma was intended to do.

One who really internalise the Dharma would feel more and more humble as the ego is peeled apart. Much like the situation in Astronomy.

Initially, we think the Sun revolves around the earth. And all the other planets do that too. There was even a complicated way of keeping track of the way the planets move just to satisfy our ego that we are in the centre of the world: the epicycle model, cycles within cycles.

Then as Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model, with simpler orbits for all planets, our sun became the centre of the Solar System. Well, it took some time for the people of the West to accept this, partly the fault of religion, partly because we cling to the ego too very much.

Then later on, our solar system is debunked to a lower status again, to be part of the many arms of our Milky Way Galaxy. Then we discovered our universe is bigger than just the Milky Way, the universe contains over 100 billion galaxies! By now, it would be absurd to think that the Milky Way is the centre amongst all these Galaxies. This principle that we learned in Science is named the Copernicus principle, saying that it is unlikely that we are occupying a special state in the Universe.

Looking at the size of our observable Universe compared to the size of the Earth, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html we can see how astronomers are constantly telling us that we do not matter in the cosmic grand design of things. The only reason we might be special is that we are the sentient beings that can question why and how we are here and be awed by all these discoveries.

Similarly, in Buddhism. The parallel of the Greeks thinking that Earth is the centre of the universe is akin to a person thinking that all the world is about him or her. He or she thinks about I, me, mine all the time. "Who's thinking about me?", "Who's out to harm me?", "Who's out to make me happy for today?" The addiction to facebook and other social networking sites are a lot about feeding this ego too, if one keeps on looking at one's profile and refreshing to get notification, likes and comments. This stage can be very dangerous, I know because I was there. It's dangerous as one interpret whatever happens to oneself is because someone else loves or hate us. It's giving our remote control to other people. One can get insane or mentally depressed if one continues to feed the ego and concentrate on the bad things that happens to oneself.

Then one derails from this thinking, mindfully observing that it is much easier to just stop assuming that everyone thinks about you all the time. One can get happier too. This is like the Copernican heliocentric revolution. One lives and let live. One can work for the welfare and benefit of  their family and friends. One gets lives a happier live as one approach the truth.

The discovery that the Solar System is not at the centre of the Milky Way would be parallel to a person being able to renounce his home and go forth into homelessness. One would surround oneself with spiritual friends and work for the welfare of all sentient beings as one's own ego reduces and one's can see that one's happiness is nothing compared to the happiness of all sentient beings.

The final step (here so far, there's more if we want to) of Milky Way is not the centre of the Universe is the final step of one attaining enlightenment. Dispelling the concept of self forever, and knowing true happiness. One can then share the experience of how to reach there and inspire the others in following the path.

I get the feeling that some New Age religion already has something similar to this. Well, this article is more about the parallels of Physics and Buddhism, and motivating our practise. Nothing more.

The Beginning

For the first post on this blog, it might be fitting to start at the beginning.

In Physics, the idea that there was a beginning came about in a hard fight in the field of cosmology. After Einstein admitted that the universe is not static, calling his modification of the equations of general relativity his greatest blunder, there are 2 main schools of thoughts.

First is the steady state theory, which says that the observation that the universe is expanding can be explained away by matter spontaneously coming into existence so that the universe is always in this state, and therefore have no beginning.

Second is the now familiar big bang theory. It says that if the universe is expanding now, then it must have been in a state of very high density. Extrapolating back in time, we get the beginning of the universe when the density goes to infinity. The universe is of zero size. Now the figure is 13.7 billion years ago. And the moment of the big bang is called the singularity. The ridiculous state of the universe where most laws of physics break down.

Now if this blog, or dialogue between Buddhism and physics were to occur at that time, then Buddhists most likely predict that further observations will eventually support the steady state theory. After all, the Buddha himself said that there is no way to conceive of a beginning.

From SN15:3 and SN 15:13:

From an inconceivable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. 

The Buddhist point of view towards the beginning is that if there is a effect, there must be a cause. And tracing back to the cause, it is an effect of another cause. Repeating this formula, how could we have a first cause without something causing it to happen? [1]

In almost the same sense, this is the physics dilemma too with the big bang theory. Once you are at the singularity, what caused it to expand in the first place? What guarantees that all the laws of physics that comes after is conducive for a life bearing universe? [2]

Now back to the debate between steady state theory and the big bang theory. Those of Abrahamic religion with an open mind will most likely root for the big bang theory. The big bang is the moment when God created the universe, they would say, so no one can see it or understand it. Hence it is not surprising that the laws of physics breaks down there.

I for one am glad I wasn't an active engaged physicists Buddhist at that time. Or else I would have a great punch in the face to my faith when experimental evidence supports the big bang theory and the steady state theory has died down.

This story above tells us of the danger of trying to mix up science and religion, using science to support or to disprove religion.

It is in the nature of all things to be impermanent, including our best knowledge of how the universe works. So science as a discipline is ever changing. While I would have said that the words of religions which shows the ultimate and absolute truths will never change, that would be naive and attaching too much to the fingers that are pointing towards the moon. The words are there, but the way to interpret them is renewed with each generation.

It is for this very reason, the constant need to renew our understanding of those words, that the attitude that Buddhist use towards these things is:

Most if not all of what the Buddha said is to help us gain enlightenment, not necessary to be interpreted literally, like the case of the beginning above. Do read SN15:3 and SN 15:13 and see for yourself.

So do not be attached to the fingers, but rather look beyond and see the moon.

Well, we can certainly adopt this view, and drop this blog all together. But, there's always a but, then there might be other benefits from this dialogue between Buddhism and physics that we'll miss out completely. What are these? The very fact that it occupies a very active thinking mind and distracts it from playing games would be a start.

Now back to the story.

When the big bang theory won out, physicists have been working on the details of almost every part of the evolution of the cosmos. Even up to now, the large Hadron Collider at CERN is recreating the conditions near to the big bang and exploring the new physics there. The largest problem so far is the combination of the 2 main pillars of modern physics: General relativity and Quantum physics near the singularity. Both theories disagree with one another and seems to predict that the laws of physics breaks down near to the singularity.

Hence the great effort now to search for or develop or think of the ultimate theory of everything that can combine those two and explain away how did the big bang happen? Then maybe we can ask why the big bang happened. Meanwhile, there are other approaches from the cosmology side.

There were proposals of how the universe will end and the natural combination of one of the most symmetrical way for it to end is the big crunch plus the big bang, producing a big bounce. It requires that the universe is dense enough so that gravity will pull everything back together again in the reverse of the big bang into a big crunch. Then by some magic of string or M theory, after passing through the Plank scale, getting smaller is equal to getting bigger, hence the cause of a big bang can be explained, and there can be no beginning to the universe, or series of multiverses.

It's a beautiful theory that can fit right into Buddhism. And if Buddhist happens to cling on to this idea, they will soon be disappointed as well. It turns out yet again that the universe is not showing signs that it is slowing down, but rather it is accelerating out at an increasing rate. (From the datas of 1998) Eventually our universe most probably will die by the big rip, where everything expands out faster than the speed of light. Even if the observational data happen to be wrong, the theory of the infinite big bounce has a theoretical flaw.

Entropy does not get reversed during the phase of the big crunch. The arrow of time is still toward disorder.and eventually, with each new universe, the entropy will increase and makes the next cycles longer and bigger and more unlikely to harbor any life, for a long long time. Ok maybe not so bad, so let's drop this idea because of the observation data then.

Next is to consider the scenario if the universe is flat or open. A big freeze and heat death will happen as the entropy of the universe maximize itself and for a long long time, nothing will ever change. Until this moment of extreme unlikeliness that eventually happens when you have an eternity to wait. At this moment, the universe by chance became ordered again and the next big bang happened. Just like how a box of white and black marbles will eventually reorder itself to their halves of the box that is shaken for a long enough time, so does entropy eventually gets reversed at a local scale in a long enough time. Thus no beginning. (As inspired by Asimov's story: the last question)

Not so bad for a theory of creation and destruction cycles like what the Buddhist texts say. Again, the big freeze is unlikely to happen now that we know the big rip is going to happen. Back to the drawing board again.

Now it's been a long roller coaster ride, and still there is no satisfying way of finding a beginingless universe in physics. Yet there's still hope. The inflationary universe theory is required to explain why is the cosmic background radiation so smooth and why don't we find monopoles amongst other stuffs. According to it, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a while near the singularity and then stopped and expanded at the slower than the speed of light rate.

So the trick here is to think why did every part of the universe stopped at the same time? Did some parts kept on expanding? Thus creating new spaces, parallel universes, and these universes kept on expanding producing their own child universe. If this is true, why should we be so egotistical and claim that we are near the singularity? Might not everything that the big bang theory predicted would happen happened in the infinite past? In fact why should it happen at all? Why not just let there be inflation traced back to inflation in a never ending cycle? This would fit in nicely with the beginningless philosophy of Buddhism.

One question I would like to ask of this infinite inflation through. Where did all the energy come from?

And so at the beginning of this article, I had still clung on to the infinite inflation view. But now, I learned not to be attached to a theory of Physics just because it seems to point towards the same object as Buddhism. Many fingers point to a moon, do not attach to the fingers, so that when the fingers change, we still see the moon.

Do you see the moon that both Physics and Buddhism are pointing towards?

Also interesting read:
[1]. The Universe in a single atom by the 14th Dalai Lama, Chapter 4: The Big Bang and the Buddhist Beginningless Universe.
[2]. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow: Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going

P.S. I did an presentation on this: http://www.slideshare.net/NgXinZhao/physics-and-buddhism-the-problem-of-the-beginning Feel free to download and to understand it. I won't be updating this for a while yet.