..续本文上一页 it, beginnings and endings.
The suttas even give a measure for the lifetime of a universe. When I was a theoretical physicist, my areas of expertise were the very small and the very large; fundamental particle physics and astrophysics. They were the two aspects that I liked the most, the big and the small. So I knew what was meant by the age of a universe and what a ”big bang” was all about. The age of a universe, the last time I looked in the journals, was somewhere about seventeen thousand million years. In the Buddhist suttas they say that about thirty seven thousand million years is a complete age. When I told that to the state astronomer he said yes, that estimate was in the ball park, it was acceptable. The person who was the convener of the Our Place in Space seminar made a joke about the fact that a hundred or two hundred years ago, Christianity said the universe was about seven thousand years old. That estimate certainly isn”t acceptable, the Buddhist one is!
It is remarkable that there was a cosmology in Buddhism twenty-five centuries ago that doesn”t conflict with modern physics. Even what astronomers say are galaxies, the Buddha called wheel systems. If any of you have ever seen a galaxy, you will know there are two types of galaxy. First, there is the spiral galaxy. The Milky Way is one of those. Have you seen a spiral galaxy
It is like a wheel! The other type is the globular cluster, which looks like a wheel with a big hub in the middle. ”Wheels” is a very accurate way of describing galaxies. This was explained by someone twenty five centuries ago, when they did not have telescopes! They didn”t need them, they could go there themselves!
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the old suttas, even for those of you who like weird stuff. Some times people ask this question, "Do Buddhists believe in extra terrestrial beings, in aliens
" Would an alien landing here upset the very foundation of Buddhism
When I was reading through these old suttas I actually found a reference to aliens! It”s only a very small sutta, which said that there are other world systems with other suns, other planets, and other beings on them. That”s directly from the Anguttara Nikaya. (AN X, 29)
The Ghost in the Machine
During the seminar at the West Perth Observatory, one of the audience put their hand up and asked, "Why is it that when I look through a telescope I feel that my religion is challenged
" She was a Catholic. She explained that she felt scared when she looked through a telescope, because what she saw did not agree with what she read in her bible. As a Buddhist you don”t need to be afraid. I took that question and turned it back on to the scientists by asking, "What if you looked through the opposite end of the telescope to investigate the one who is looking
I think you scientists would be scared. You would be afraid if you turned the telescope inwards and looked into yourselves, and asked who is looking at all of this
" Part of the problem with science is that it is all ”out there”. It”s always a person looking through the telescope, looking at the apparatus, but never reflecting back to see who is actually looking at all this. Who is doing this
When the discussion was starting to get a bit dull, I decided to stir up the State Astronomer by talking about life. Any scientists here would know that quantum mechanics, or quantum theory, describes the world as composed of wave functions. The wave function specifies the probability of an observable event. However, when life gets involved, when an observation is made, the wave function collapses and reality as we know it occurs. There has to be observation, a life there, to make it happen. The quantum theory needed an observer, a life, to give meaning to the equations. After the q…
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