6 Famous International Physicists who were influenced by Hinduism

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•Erwin Schrödinger

•Werner Heisenberg

•Robert Oppenheimer

•Niels Bohr

•Carl Sagan

•Nikola Tesla

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Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian physicist, one of the founders of quantum theory, and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. His ideas were heavily influenced by monist philosophy and he is particularly well known for original interpretations of the significance of the wave function and for devising the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.







http://www.inannareturns.com/article...chrodinger.htm

Quantum Physics, Vedic Thought, and Schrodinger’s Wave Equation



The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger - of Schrodinger’s Cat fame - ‘devised the wave equation every quantum system must obey’ and represented ‘quantum stuff as a waveform’ [N. Herbert].



Profoundly influenced by Vedic thought, Schrodinger kept copies of the Sanskrit texts by his bed - the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads.



Would modern science have ever embraced quantum physics without Schrodinger’s understanding of Vedic thought?



Subhash Kak, both a scientist and an Indologist, has written a most interesting article on Schrodinger’s involvement in Vedanta suggesting how modern thought has been influenced by Vedic traditions. Professor Kak tells us that:



…before he [Schrodinger] created quantum mechanics he expressed his intention to give form to central ideas of Vedanta, which, therefore, has had a role in the birth of quantum mechanics.



In 1925, before his revolutionary theory was complete, Erwin Schrodinger wrote:



“This life of yours, which you are living, is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the ‘whole’; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.



“This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world.”



In 1944 Schrodinger wrote the influential book, What is Life? which everyone agrees used Vedic ideas. A clear continuity exists between Schrodinger's understanding of Vedanta and his research, according to his biographer, Walter Moore:



The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the worldview of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.



To read Subhash Kak’s entire most enlightening article:

http://www.atributetohinduism.com/ar...induism/96.htm





In another online article on Erwin Schrodinger, Dr. C. P. Girija Vallabhan, a professor at International School of Photonics at Cochin University of Science and Technology, the influence of Vedanta on Schrodinger’s quantum theories is described:



Schrodinger read widely and thought deeply about the techniques of ancient Hindu scriptures and reworked them into his own words and eventually came to believe in them. This was evident from many of his writings.



Erwin Schrodinger when he devised his wave equation leading to discovery of wave mechanics. He found the reality of physics in wave motions and he also based this reality on an underlying unity of mind. Schrodinger was well versed in the techniques of Bhagavat Gita…





According to Dr. C. P. Girija Vallabhan, in autumn of 1925 Schrodinger wrote:



"Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.”



HE [Schrodinger] fully acknowledges Sankara's view that Brahman is associated with a certain power called Maya to which is -due the appearance of the entire world. … Schrodinger did not believe that it will be possible to demonstrate the unity of consciousness by logical arguments. One must make imaginative leap guided by communion with nature and the persuasion of analogies.



Full online article

http://www.photonics.cusat.edu/article2.html



Erwin Schrodinger on Quantum Theory:

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).



The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.



Photographs of the quite handsome Schrodinger and more quotations:

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantu...ger-quotes.htm



More links on Erwin Schrodinger

http://www.answers.com/topic/erwin-schr-dinger



Schrödinger's cat for a 6th grader

http://www.mtnmath.com/cat.html



Computing Science in Ancient India

T.R.N. Rao & Subhash Kak

Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.; 2000, New Delhi



Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

Nick Herbert

Anchor Books/Random House; 1985, New York

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Werner Karl Heisenberg ( 5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".

He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in Munich, in 1957. He was a principal scientist in the Nazi German nuclear weapon project during World War II. He travelled to occupied Copenhagen where he met and discussed the German project with Niels Bohr.

Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which soon thereafter was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

Heisenberg was also president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation








https://www.fritjofcapra.net/heisenberg-and-tagore/


In 1972, I met Werner Heisenberg, one of the giants of modern physics, whose book Physics and Philosophy had a decisive influence on my thinking and, in fact, determined the trajectory of my entire career as a scientist and writer. I gave a detailed account of my conversations with Heisenberg and of my personal impressions of him in my book Uncommon Wisdom (Simon and Schuster, 1988; pp. 40ff.).

At that time, I had just begun to work on The Tao of Physics, and so I was naturally curious to hear Heisenberg’s thoughts on Eastern philosophy. He told me to my great surprise not only that he had been well aware of the parallels between quantum physics and Eastern thought, but also that his own scientific work had been influenced, at least at the subconscious level, by Indian philosophy.

Here is how I recorded that part of our conversation.


“In 1929 Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. ‘After these conversations with Tagore,’ he said, ‘some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.’”
(Uncommon Wisdom, p. 43)

After the publication of my account, I tried repeatedly to find an independent confirmation of Heisenberg’s significant meeting with Tagore, but I did not succeed. I looked through several biographies of Tagore and spoke to Tagore scholars, but could not find anyone who knew about that meeting. For many years I felt slightly uncomfortable thinking that my recollection of my conversation with Heisenberg might be the only source of this historical encounter.

It was only very recently that a friend of mine, Brazilian historian of science Gustavo Rocha, showed me two sources in which the Heisenberg–Tagore meeting is mentioned. They confirmed my recollection with only minor differences.

In his biography of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist Helmut Rechenberg, who was a student of Heisenberg, gives a detailed account of Heisenberg’s 1929 lecture tour around the world, which took him from Germany to the United States, Japan, India, and back to Germany (see Helmut Rechenberg, Werner Heisenberg — die Sprache derAtome, pp. 797 ff.).

On October 4, 1929, Rechenberg writes, Heisenberg visited the University of Kolkata, where he was received with great honors by the entire faculty, and in the afternoon of that day he visited Rabindranath Tagore. On the following day, Heisenberg wrote to his parents: “Nachmittags war ich bei dem indischen Dichter Rabindranath Tagore zu Gast…” (“In the afternoon, I was the guest of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore…”; Rechenberg, p. 808).

At our meeting in Munich, 43 years later, Heisenberg used very similar words. “In Indien war ich bei Rabindranath Tagore zu Gast,” he told me, “und wir sprachen lange über Wissenschaft und indische Philosophie.” (“In India I was the guest of Rabindranath Tagore, and we spoke for a long time about science and Indian philosophy.”). At that time, I misinterpreted his words “…war ich bei Rabindranath Tagore zu Gast” as meaning that he was a house guest of Tagore; and “wir sprachen lange…” as meaning that they had several long conversations, instead of just one conversation during a long afternoon.

Another account of the Heisenberg-Tagore meeting is given in the book Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (St. Martin’s Press, 1995; footnote, p. 283). “Heisenberg expressed an interest in seeing RT,” the authors write, “and was taken to [Tagore’s villa] by the scientist D.M. Bose, a nephew of J.C. Bose. ‘We left Heisenberg to have a talk with the poet. I do not remember what was the substance of this talk, but Heisenberg was very much impressed by the poet’s illuminatory personality, which reminded him of a prophet of the old days’ (Bose Institute, p. 15).”

The authors then add: “However, according to Heisenberg’s wife (who was not a scientist), ‘my husband was not too much impressed by his [Tagore’s] thoughts. The mixture of eastern and western philosophy in his thoughts did not really convince him’ (Elisabeth Heisenberg to Authors, 3 Oct. 1990).”

In my view, Heisenberg may not have been very impressed by Tagore’s remarks right away. But I believe that over the years, he absorbed Tagore’s expositions much more fully, and that late in his life, when I met him, he had realized their influence on his thinking.

Indeed, when I sent Heisenberg a copy of my first article about modern physics and Eastern mysticism, titled “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics,” he replied: “Haben Sie den besten Dank für die Übersendung Ihrer Arbeit ‘The Dance of Shiva’. Die Verwandtschaft der alten östlichen Lehren mit den philosophischen Konsequenzen der modernen Quantentheorie haben [sic] mich immer wieder fasziniert…” (“Many thanks for sending me your paper ‘The Dance of Shiva.’ The kinship between the ancient Eastern teachings and the philosophical consequences of the modern quantum theory have [sic] fascinated me again and again…”; letter of July 9, 1971).

Heisenberg’s acknowledgment of the parallels between quantum theory and Indian philosophy gave me tremendous moral support while I wrote The Tao of Physics, and I am delighted that I have now finally found confirmation of his historic encounter with Rabindranath Tagore, which he described to me so emphatically during our conversation.

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Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico. Oppenheimer later remarked that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

YouTube

After the war ended, Oppenheimer became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken opinions during the Second Red Scare, he suffered the revocation of his security clearance in a much-publicized hearing in 1954, and was effectively stripped of his direct political influence; he continued to lecture, write and work in physics. Nine years later, President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.

Oppenheimer's achievements in physics included the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays. As a teacher and promoter of science, he is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics that gained world prominence in the 1930s. After World War II, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.








Oppenheimer's Regret


"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/anderson1/

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Niels Henrik David Bohr ( 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.

Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity dominated Bohr's thinking in both science and philosophy.

Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920. Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy, and Werner Heisenberg. He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. Later, the element bohrium was named after him.

During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After Denmark was occupied by the Germans, he had a famous meeting with Heisenberg, who had become the head of the German nuclear weapon project. In September 1943, word reached Bohr that he was about to be arrested by the Germans, and he fled to Sweden. From there, he was flown to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957.





The human being is the central mystery of the universe holding the key to all other mysteries. Indeed, human beings are our own greatest enigma. As the famous physicist, Niels Bohr once said, "We are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." Hence the importance of developing of what is known as the "science of human possibilities." It was such a science that India sought and found in the Upanishads in an attempt to unravel the mystery of human beings.

https://www.learnreligions.com/the-u...basics-1770575

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Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect.

Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries.

The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress.

Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.

YouTube

I’ve written before about how influential Carl Sagan was in my childhood. Not only his views of science and philosophy but also his views on religion. My interest in Hinduism goes far back into my elementary school years when I discovered that there was a religion that had such a enormous vision of cosmos.

I had to find out more. Rather than the universe being only a few thousand years old (as I had learned in church), Hindus believed that the universe was billions and billions of years old – and that there were an infinite number of universes previous to this one! That was a view of the world that truly encompassed the scale of a divine creator; not a small god that had only been around for a few years, interested only in the affairs of a few, special people on one small planet. I had discovered that there was another way of thinking.

It was Carl Sagan that helped me first awaken that sense of complete awe at the scale of universe. Though Sagan was an agnostic, I get the feeling if he were to have chosen a religion, Hinduism would have been it. Here is the clip from Cosmos that I saw when I was a kid. His sense of child-like wonder and fascination is as infectious today as it was then. Enjoy!

http://www.nautis.com/carl-sagan-on-hinduism/

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Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla received an advanced education in engineering and physics in the 1870s and gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. He emigrated in 1884 to the United States, where he would become a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company would eventually market.

Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.

After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943.[8] Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor.

There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s.





Nikola Tesla and Swami Vivekananda
by Mr. Toby Grotz, President, Wireless Engineering

Swami Vivekananda, late in the year l895 wrote in a letter to an English friend, "Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go and see him next week to get this new mathematical demonstration. In that case the Vedantic cosmoloqy will be placed on the surest of foundations. I am working a good deal now upon the cosmology and eschatology of the Vedanta. I clearly see their perfect union with modern science, and the elucidation of the one will be followed by that of the other." (Complete Works, Vol. V, Fifth Edition, 1347, p. 77).

Here Swamiji uses the terms force and matter for the Sanskrit terms Prana and Akasha. Tesla used the Sanskrit terms and apparently understood them as energy and mass. (In Swamiji's day, as in many dictionaries published in the first half of the present century, force and energy were not alwavys clearly differentiated. Energy is a more proper translation of the Sanskrit term Prana.)


Tesla apparently failed in his effort to show the identity of mass and energy. Apparently he understood that when speed increases, mass must decrease. He seems to have thought that mass might be "converted" to energy and vice versa, rather than that they were identical in some way, as is pointed out in Einstein's equations. At any rate, Swamiji seems to have sensed where the difficulty lay in joining the maps of European science and Advaita Vedanta and set Tesla to solve the problem. It is apparently in the hope that Tesla would succeed in this that Swamiji says "In that case the Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations." Unfortunately Tesla failed and the solution did not come till ten years later, in a paper by Albert Einstein. But by then Swamiji was gone and the connecting of the maps was delayed.

The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on

Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy

An Article by Toby Grotz

Web Publication by Mountain Man Graphics, Australia - Southern Autumn of 1997

Abstract ...

Nikola Tesla used ancient Sanskrit terminology in his descriptions of natural phenomena. As early as 1891 Tesla described the universe as a kinetic system filled with energy which could be harnessed at any location. His concepts during the following years were greatly influenced by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda was the first of a succession of eastern yogi's who brought Vedic philosophy and religion to the west. After meeting the Swami and after continued study of the Eastern view of the mechanisms driving the material world, Tesla began using the Sanskrit words Akasha, Prana, and the concept of a luminiferous ether to describe the source, existence and construction of matter. This paper will trace the development of Tesla's understanding of Vedic Science, his correspondence with Lord Kelvin concerning these matters, and the relation between Tesla and Walter Russell and other turn of the century scientists concerning advanced understanding of physics. Finally, after being obscured for many years, the author will give a description of what he believes is the the pre-requisite for the free energy systems envisioned by Tesla.

https://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_and_swami.htm

[balti]

Nicely put together.

[Karmadev]

There's few more but nice job