Zen & Physics

Eastern Philosophy



Zen Buddhism was developed in early China, from the interaction between Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. Through meditation, Zen practitioners seek new perspectives and insights on existence, which ultimately lead to enlightenment. To truly understand others is to truly understand oneself, and vice-versa.

Buddhas don't save Buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a Buddha, you won't see the Buddha. As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha. Don't use a Buddha to worship a Buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a Buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And Buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.

To find a Buddha, you have to see your nature.

So, what is Zen?

The only true answer to that question, is the one that you find out for yourself.

A Hindu story tells of a fish who asked of another fish: "I have always heard about the sea, but what is it? Where is it?"

The other fish replied: "You live, move and have your being the sea. The sea is within you and without you, and you are made of sea, and you will end in sea. The sea surrounds you as your own being."

Let us try to further understand this concept. Many of the ideas in ancient Eastern philosophies, in one way or another, are very similiar to those in quantum physics. We'll see how they are related.

Bose-Einstein Condensate

Matter can exist in various states; solid, liquid or gas. Atoms at high temperature always form gases. If you cool the gas, it becomes a liquid. If you cool a liquid, it becomes a solid. But under certain circumstances, if you cool atoms far enough to extremely low temperatures, they undergo a very strange transformation. An identity crisis!

Imagine that atoms are like tiny dots. When you go to low temperatures, the quantum mechanics of the atoms become important. In fact, each of these atoms will start to display wave-like properties. They begin to stretch out like small wavy strings, moving around. Once you go into near absolute zero temperatures, the size of these wavy strings get longer and longer. Particles begin to slow down.



If you get them cold enough, they to start overlapping each other and merge. We can this the Bose-Einstein condensate. This unique state of matter was first proposed by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein back in the 1920's.

The whole system does not behave like individual particles, because each have loss their identity and think they are everywhere at once. You can't tell whether they are here or there, or which one for that matter. Now, they are all just simply at rest. We don't consider individual particles anymore because they all form one big quantum system, all doing the same thing.

Easy science concept:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzHnApHM9A