Concept of Time

"After a cycle of universal dissolution, the Supreme Being decides to recreate the cosmos so that we souls can experience worlds of shape and solidity. Very subtle atoms begin to combine, eventually generating a cosmic wind that blows heavier and heavier atoms together. Souls depending on their karma earned in previous world systems, spontaneously draw to themselves atoms that coalesce into an appropriate body." - The Prashasta Pada. Grandiose time scales Hinduism’s understanding of time is as grandiose as time itself. While most cultures base their cosmologies on familiar units such as few hundreds or thousands of years, the Hindu concept of time embraces billions and trillions of years. The Puranas describe time units from the infinitesimal truti, lasting 1/1,000,0000 of a second to a mahamantavara of 311 trillion years. Hindu sages describe time as cyclic, an endless procession of creation, preservation and dissolution. Scientists such as Carl Sagan have expressed amazement at the accuracy of space and time descriptions given by the ancient rishis and saints, who fathomed the secrets of the universe through their mystically awakened senses. (source: Hinduism Today April/May/June 2007 p. 14). As in modern physics, Hindu cosmology envisaged the universe as having a cyclical nature. The end of each kalpa brought about by Shiva's dance is also the beginning of the next. Rebirth follows destruction. wpe32.jpg (3455 bytes)The transcendence of time is the aim of every Indian spiritual tradition. Time is often presented as an eternal wheel that binds the soul to a mortal existence of ignorance and suffering. "Release" from time's fateful wheel is termed moksha, and an advanced ascetic may be called kala-attita (' he who has transcended time'). Hindus believe that the universe is without a beginning (anadi= beginning-less) or an end (ananta = end-less). Rather the universe is projected in cycles. Time immemorial is measured in cycles called Kalpas. A Kalpa is a day and night for Brahma, the Lord of Creation. After each Kalpa, there is another Kalpa. Each Kalpa is composed of 1,000 Maha Yugas. A Kalpa is thus equal to 4.32 billion human years. Kirtha Yuga or Satya yuga (golden or truth age) is 1,728,000 years; Treta yuga is 1,296,000 years; Dvapara yuga is 864,000 years; and Kali Yuga is 432,000 years. Total duration of the four yugas is called a kalpa. At the end of kalyuga the universe is dissolved by pralaya (cosmic deluge ) and another cycle begins. Each cycle of creation lasts one kalpa, that is 12,000,000 human years ( or 12,000 Brahma years). One Maha Yuga is 4,32 million years. Krita or Satya golden age 1,728,000 years Treta silver age 1,296,000 years Dvapara copper age 864,000 years Kali iron age 432,000 years Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video A Brahma, or Lord of Creation, lives for one hundred Brahma years (each of made up of 360 Brahma days). After that he dies. So a Brahma lives for 36,000 Kalpas, or 36,000 x 2,000 x 4,30,000 human years – i.e., a Brahma lives for 311.4 trillion human years. After the death of each Brahma, there is a Mahapralaya or Cosmic deluge, when all the universe is destroyed. Then a new Brahma appears and creation starts all over again. (source: Am I a Hindu - by Ed Viswanathan p. 292 - 293). For more on Yugas, refer to One Cosmic Day of Creator Brahma) Time in Hindu mythology is conceived as a wheel turning through vast cycles of creation and destruction (pralaya), known as kalpa. In the words of famous writer, Joseph Campbell: "The Hindus with their grandiose Kalpas and their ideas of the divine power which is beyond all human category (male or female). Not so alien to the imagery of modern science that it could not have been put to acceptable use." According to Guy Sorman, visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at Stanford and the leader of new liberalism in France: "Temporal notions in Europe were overturned by an India rooted in eternity. The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring time, but the infinitely vast time cycles of India suggested that the world was much older than anything the Bible spoke of. It seem as if the Indian mind was better prepared for the chronological mutations of Darwinian evolution and astrophysics." (source: The Genius of India - By Guy Sorman ('Le Genie de l'Inde') Macmillan India Ltd. 2001. ISBN 0333 93600 0 p. 195). For more on Guy Sorman refer to chapter Quotes201_220).(Refer to Visions of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com). Huston Smith a philosopher, most eloquent writer, world-famous religion scholar who practices Hatha Yoga. Has taught at MIT and is currently visiting professor at Univ. of California at Berkley. Smith has also produced PBS series. He has written various books, The World's Religions, "Science and Human Responsibility", and "The Religions of Man" says: “Philosophers tell us that the Indians were the first ones to conceive of a true infinite from which nothing is excluded. The West shied away from this notion. The West likes form, boundaries that distinguish and demarcate. The trouble is that boundaries also imprison – they restrict and confine.” “India saw this clearly and turned her face to that which has no boundary or whatever.” “India anchored her soul in the infinite seeing the things of the world as masks of the infinite assumes – there can be no end to these masks, of course. If they express a true infinity.” And It is here that India’s mind boggling variety links up to her infinite soul.” “India includes so much because her soul being infinite excludes nothing.” It goes without saying that the universe that India saw emerging from the infinite was stupendous.” While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe – India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.” (source: The Mystic's Journey - India and the Infinite: The Soul of a People – By Huston Smith). For more on Huston Smith refer to chapter Quotes41_60). Dr. Carl Sagan in his book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, remarks: "Immanuel Velikovsky (the author of Earth in Upheaval) in his book Worlds in Collision, notes that the idea of four ancient ages terminated by catastrophe is common to Indian as well as to Western sacred writing. However, in the Bhagavad Gita and in the Vedas, widely divergent numbers of such ages, including an infinity of them, are given; but, more interesting, the duration of the ages between major catastrophes is specified as billions of years. .. " "The idea that scientists or theologians, with our present still puny understanding of this vast and awesome cosmos, can comprehend the origins of the universe is only a little less silly than the idea that Mesopotamian astronomers of 3,000 years ago – from whom the ancient Hebrews borrowed, during the Babylonian captivity, the cosmological accounts in the first chapter of Genesis – could have understood the origins of the universe. We simply do not know. The Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda (X:129), has a much more realistic view of the matter: “Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it? Whence was it born, whence came creation? The gods are later than this world’s formation; Who then can know the origins of the world? None knows whence creation arose; And whether he has or has not made it; He who surveys it from the lofty skies, Only he knows- or perhaps he knows not." (source: Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science - By Carl Sagan p. 106 - 137). Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video The theory of animal life and particularly of man was correctly understood by the ancient thinkers. The Brihat Vishnu Purana states that "the aquatic life precedes the monkey life" and that "the monkey life is the precursor of the human life." The same theory was explained in an interesting way by the dashavatara (ten incarnations). But evolution, as everything else, was the manifestation of the supreme spirit (Atman) as is testified by Chandogya Upanishad. (source: Ancient Indian History and Culture - By Chidambara Kulkarni Orient Longman Ltd. 1974. p.268). wpe33.jpg (4159 bytes)Hinduism is the only religion that propounds the idea of life-cycles of the universe. It suggests that the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. Hinduism, according to Carl Sagan, "... is the only religion in which the time scales correspond... to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of the Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang" Long before Aryabhata (6th century) came up with this awesome achievement, apparently there was a mythological angle to this as well -- it becomes clear when one looks at the following translation of Bhagavad Gita (part VIII, lines 16 and 17), "All the planets of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is worth a thousand of the ages [yuga] known to humankind; as is each night." Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga must be repeated a thousand times to make a "day ot Brahma", a unit of time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets 8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was later theorized (possibly independently) by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by contraction... a cosmos without end. This, according to modern physicists is not an impossibility. (source: Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India). Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, says: "he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed." (source: Mountain Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck). In Hindu thought, interspersed between linear, time-limited existences lie timeless intervals of non-existence. The creation hymn of the Hindus, Nasadiya-sukta of Rig-Veda, affirms an absolute beginning of things and describes the origin of the universe as being beyond the concepts of existence and non-existence “The Hindu ... pictured the universe as periodically expanding and contracting and gave the name Kalpa to the time span between the beginning and the end of one creation. The scale of this space or time is indeed staggering. It has taken more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept.” Hindu culture had this unique vision of the infiniteness of time as well as the infinity of space. When modern astronomy deals with billion of years, Hindu creation concepts deal with trillions of years. Vedanta upholds the idea that creation is timeless, having no beginning in time. Each creation and dissolution follows in sequence. The whole cosmos exists in two states -- the unmanifested or undifferentiated state and the manifested or differentiated state. (source: The Origin of the Universe - By K B N Sarma - sulekha.com). John Bowle, categorically declares that Plato was influenced by Indian ideas. (source: A New Outline of World History - By John Bowle p. 91). Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, have recently developed The Cyclical Model. They have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century. The theorists acknowledge that their cyclic concept draws upon religious and scientific ideas going back for millennia — echoing the "oscillating universe" model that was in vogue in the 1930s, as well as the Hindu belief that the universe has no beginning or end, but follows a cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution. (source: Questioning the Big Bang - msnbcnews.com). Dick Teresi ( ? ) author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written: "The big bang is the biggest-budget universe ever, with mind-boggling numbers to dazzle us – a technique pioneered by fifth-century A.D. Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years. The cycle of creation and destruction continues forever, manifested in the Hindu deity Shiva, Lord of the Dance, who holds the drum that sounds the universe’s creation in his right hand and the flame that, billions of years later, will destroy the universe in his left. Meanwhile Brahma is but one of untold numbers of other gods dreaming their own universes. The 8.64 billion years that mark a full day-and-night cycle in Brahma’s life is about half the modern estimate for the age of the universe. The ancient Hindus believed that each Brahma day and each Brahma night lasted a kalpa, 4.32 billion years, with 72,000 kalpas equaling a Brahma century, 311,040 billion years in all. That the Hindus could conceive of the universe in terms of billions." (source: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick Teresi p. 159 and 174 -212). The Hindus, according to Sir Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of the present age. The French historian Louis Jacolliot says, "Here to mock are conceit, our apprehensions, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ about Evolution: ' The first germ of life was developed by water and heat.' (Book I, sloka 8,9 ) ' Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains are born the plants, and from the plants, animals.' (Book III, sloka 76). (source: Philosophy of Hinduism - By T C Galav ISBN: 0964237709 p 17). Sir John Woodroffe, (1865-1936) the well known scholar, Advocate-General of Bengal and sometime Legal Member of the Government of India. He served with competence for eighteen years and in 1915 officiated as Chief Justice. He has said: "Ages before Lamarck and Darwin it was held in India that man has passed through 84 lakhs (8,400,000) of birth as plants, animals, as an "inferior species of man" and then as the ancestor of the developed type existing to-day. "The theory was not, like modern doctrine of evolution, based wholly on observation and a scientific enquiry into fact but was a rather (as some other matters) an act of brilliant intuition in which observation may also have had some part." (source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe Publisher: Ganesh & Co. Publishers Date of Publication: 1922 p. 22). Thus, in Hinduism, science and religion are not opposed fundamentally, as they often seem to be in the West, but are seen as parts of the same great search for truth and enlightenment that inspired the sages of Hinduism. Fundamental to Hindu concept of time and space is the notion that the external world is a product of the creative play of Maya (illusion). Kapila Rishi To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas. (image source: Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Inc - 2002 calendar). Refer to Indian Institute of Scientific Heritage and Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video "To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it." It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness." (source: Spiritual Practices of India - By Frederic Spiegelberg Introduction by Alan Watts p. 8-9). The late scientist, Carl Sagan, asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). According to Carl Sagan, (1934-1996) astro-physicist, in his book Cosmos says: "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. "It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics. "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still." (source: Cosmos - By Carl Sagan ISBN: 0375508325 p. 213 -214). Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) Austrian-born famous theoretical high-energy physicist and ecologist wrote: "Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance." (source: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism - By Fritjof Capra p. 241-245). Nancy Wilson Ross (1901 -1986) made her first trip to Japan, China, Korea and India in 1939. She was the author of several books including The World of Zen and Time's Left Corner. Miss Ross lectured on Zen Buddhism at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. She served on the board of the Asia Society of New York which was founded by John D. Rockefeller III since its founding in 1956 and was on the governing board of the India Council. In private life she was known as Mrs. Stanley Young. She has written: "Anachronistic as this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the foreign mind, many of India’s ancient theories about the universe are startlingly modern in scope and worthy of a people who are credited with the invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its application of astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully observed the heavens that, in the opinion of Monier-Williams, they determined the moon’s synodical revolution much more correctly than the Greeks." " Many hundreds of years before those great European pioneers, Galileo and Copernicus, had to pay heavy prices in ridicule and excommunication for their daring theories, a section of the Vedas known as the Brahmanas contained this astounding statement: “The sun never sets or rises. When people think the sun is setting, he only changes about after reaching the end of the day and makes night below and day to what is on the other side. Then, when people think he rises in the morning, he only shifts himself about after reaching the end of the day night, and makes day below and night to what is on the other side. In truth, he does not see at all.” "The Indians, whose theory of time, is not linear like ours – that is, not proceeding consecutively from past to present to future – have always been able to accept, seemingly without anxiety, the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe, an idea recently advanced by certain Western scientists. In Hindu cosmology, immutable Brahman, at fixed intervals, draws back into his beginningless, endless Being the whole substance of the living world. There then takes place the long “sleep” of Brahaman from which, in course of countless aeons, there is an awakening, and another universe or “dream” emerges. " "This notion of the sleeping and waking, or contracting and expanding, of the Life Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has recently been expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a British scientific journal by Professor Fred Hoyle, Britain’s foremost astronomer. " Lord Vishnu sleeping on a coiled serpent. Chalukya Period. 6th century A.D. Relief in Sanctuary # 9, Aihole, Lord Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity, while he waits for the universe to recreate itself. For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor Refer to Indian Institute of Scientific Heritage and Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video "Plainly, contemporary Western science’s description of an astronomical universe of such vast magnitude that distances must be measured in terms as abstract as light-years is not new to Hinduism whose wise men, millennia ago, came up with the term kalpa to signify the inconceivable duration of the period elapsing between the beginning and end of a world system. "It is clear that Indian religious cosmology is sharply at variance with that inherited by Western peoples from the Semites. On the highest level, when stripped of mythological embroidery, Hinduism’s conceptions of space, time and multiple universes approximate in range and abstraction the most advanced scientific thought. " (source: Three Ways of Asian Wisdom – By Nancy Wilson Ross p. 64 - 67 and 74 - 76). Dr. Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943), the great German Indologist, a man of penetrating intellect, the keenest esthetic sensibility observed: “In one of the Puranic accounts of the deeds of Vishnu in his Boar Incarnation or Avatar, occurs a casual reference to the cyclic recurrence of the great moments of myth. The Boar, carrying on his arm the goddess Earth whom he is in the act of rescuing from the depths of the sea, passingly remarks to her: “Every time I carry you this way….” For the Western mind, which believes in single, epoch-making, historical events (such as, for instance, the coming of Christ) this casual comment of the ageless god has a gently minimizing, annihilating effect." (source: The Myth and Symbols in India Art and Civilization – By Heinrich Zimmer p. 18 and 152 - 155 ). Professor Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows: "Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book." When the Hindu calculation of the present age of the earth and the expanding universe could make Professor Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound. (source: Hinduism and Scientific Quest - By T. R. R. Iyengar p. 20-21). The Upanishads developed this spirit of inquiry, and traces of naturalistic and scientific thought in them are quite significant. The Samkhya system, which has been described as the ruling philosophy of pre-Buddhist India and an orthodox system having its roots in the Upanishads, is essentially rational, anti-theistic, and intellectual. According to Richard Garbe, it was in Samkhya doctrine that complete independence and freedom of the human mind was exhibited for the first time in history. Samkhya, probably the oldest Indian philosophical system, furnished the background for the Yoga system, and the early Buddhist biography Lalitavistara includes both Samkhya and Yoga in the curriculum of study for the young Buddha. Samkhya is generally ascribed to Sage Kapila and Yoga to Sage Patanjali. Ideas of natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. Like in other ancient civilizations, in Hindu India priests and scientists were often the same persons; the conflict between religion and reason is not the primitive condition but a contingent historical development in post-classical Europe, paralleled to an extent by the stagnation of Muslim culture from the 12th century onwards. The Sankya philosophy of Kapila, in short, is devoted entirely to the systematic, logical, and scientific explanation of the process of cosmic evolution from that primordial Prakriti, or eternal Energy. There is no ancient philosophy in the world which was not indebted to the sankhya system of Kapila. The idea of evolution which the ancient Greeks and neo-Platonists had can be traced back to the influence of this Sankhya school of thought. (source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal - Chapter V - Naturalism and Science in Ancient India - p.153 - 188). Professor Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932) Indologist, Chair of Sanskrit Studies of Yale, says: "Plato is full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century B.C. all the religious-philosophical idea of Pythagoras are current in India (L. Schroeder, Pythagoras). If there were but one or two of these cases, they might be set aside as accidental coincidences, but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of change. " And again he writes: "Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The Gnostic ideas in regard to a plurality of heavens and spiritual worlds go back directly to Hindu sources. Soul and light are one in the Sankhyan system, before they became so in Greece, and when they appear united in Greece it is by means of the thought which is borrowed from India. The famous three qualities of the Sankhyan reappear as the Gnostic 'three classes.' (source: Religions of India - By Edward Washburn Hopkins p. 559-560). Some sources even credit Pythagoras with having traveled as far as India in search of knowledge, which may explain some of the close parallels between Indian and Pythagorean philosophy and religion. These parallels include: 1. a belief in the transmigration of souls; 2. the theory of four elements constituting matter; 3. the reasons for not eating beans; 4. the structure of the religio-philosophical character of the Pythagorean fraternity, which resembled Buddhist monastic orders; and 5. the contents of the mystical speculations of the Pythagorean schools, which bear a striking resemblance of the Hindu Upanishads. According to Greek tradition, Pythagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and others undertook journey to the East to study philosophy and science. By the time Ptolmaic Egypt and Rome’s Eastern empire had established themselves just before the beginning of the Common era, Indian civilization was already well developed, having founded three great religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – and expressed in writing some subtle currents of religious thought and speculation as well as fundamental theories in science and medicine. (source: The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of Mathematics - By George Gheverghese Joseph p. 1 - 18). For more refer to chapter on India and Greece). A 9th century Hindu scripture, The Mahapurana by Jinasena claims the something as modern as the following: (translation from [5]) "Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before creation?... How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on principles." (source: Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India). (Refer to Visions of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com). Modern people divide the day into 24 hours, the hour - into 60 minutes, the minute - into 60 seconds. Ancient Hindus divided the day in 60 periods, lasting 24 minutes each, and so on and so forth. The shortest time period of ancient Hindus made up one-three-hundred-millionth of a second. (source: Ancient nuclear blasts and levitating stones of Shivapur - By Alexander Pechersky - pravda.ru.com). Speed of Light: Sayana (c. 1315-1387) was a minister in the court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India; he was also a great Vedic scholar who wrote extensive commentaries on several ancient texts. In his commentary on the fourth verse of the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says: Tatha cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti Thus it is remembered: (O Sun), bow to you, you who travers 2,202 yojanas in half a minute. The Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9 miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second. Sayana’s statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the big bang. (source: The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak p. 75 - 77 and Sayana's Astronomy - By Subhash Kak).

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Theory of Relativity, Time Travel in Bhagavata Purana & Tripura Rahasya

Time travel and theory of relativity are still science-fiction subjects for present day human beings.
But in puranas, they’ve been discussed multiple times.
One such classic example is that of King Kakudmi and his daughter Revati, who travelled to different loka (dimension) and returned to earth in future time.

Kakudmi was a descendant of the Sun Dynasty (Suryavansha).
Kakudmi’s daughter Revati was so beautiful and so accomplished that when she reached a marriageable age, Kakudmi, thinking no one upon earth was worthy of her, went to the Creator himself, Lord Brahma, to seek his advice about a suitable husband for his daughter.

When they arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance by the Gandharvas, so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Then, Kakudmi bowed humbly, made his request and presented his shortlist of candidates. Brahma laughed loudly, and explained that time runs differently on different planes of existence, and that during the short time they had waited in Brahma-loka to see him, 27 chaturyugas (a cycle of four yugas, totalling 108 yugas, or Ages of Man [refer Concept of Time Division in Ancient India and Age of Brahma]) had passed on earth.
Brahma said to Kakudmi, “O King, all those whom you may have decided within the core of your heart to accept as your son-in-law have died in the course of time. Twenty-seven catur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants. You cannot even hear about their names.
You must therefore bestow your daughter upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies, and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand of time.”

King Kakudmi was astonished on hearing this news.
However, Brahma comforted him, and added that Vishnu, the preserver, was currently incarnate on earth in the forms of Krishna and Balarama, and he recommended Balarama as a worthy husband for Revati.

Kakudmi and Revati then returned to earth, which they regarded as having left only just a short while ago. They were shocked by the changes that had taken place. Not only had the landscape and environment changed, but over the intervening 27 chaturyugas (mahayugas), in the cycles of human spiritual and cultural evolution, mankind was at a lower level of development than in their own time (see Ages of Man).
The Bhagavata Purana describes that they found the race of men had become “dwindled in stature, reduced in vigour, and enfeebled in intellect.”

Daughter and father found Balarama and proposed the marriage, which was accepted. Since Revati came from different time behind him, she was taller than Balarama.
So, Balaram used his plough to reduce her height according to present conditions.
Their marriage was then duly celebrated.

King Muchukunda’s time travel and Musi River

Muchukunda (ancestor of Sri Rama), son of King Mandhata, was born in the Ikshvaku dynasty (Suryavansha).
In a battle, demons dominated the deities. So, Indra the King of deities requested King Muchukunda to help them in war.
King Muchukunda agreed to help them and fought against the demons for a long time. Since the deities did not have an able commander, king Muchukunda protected them against the demonic onslaught, until the deities got an able commander like Kartikeya, the son of Lord Shiva.
Then Indra said to the king Muchukunda, “O king, we, the deities are indebted to you for the help and protection which you have given us, by sacrificing your own family life. Here in the heaven, one year equals three hundred and sixty years of the earth. Since, it has been a long time, there is no sign of your kingdom and family because it has been destroyed with the passage of time. You came here in Treta Yuga and now its Dwapara Yuga on earth.
We are happy and pleased with you, so ask for any boon except Moksha(liberation) because it is beyond our capacities“.

While fighting on the side of the deities, king Muchukunda did not get an opportunity to sleep even for a moment. Now, overcome by tiredness, he was feeling very sleepy. So, he said, “O King of the deities, I want to sleep. Anyone who dares to disturb my sleep should get burnt to ashes immediately“.
Indra said, “So be it, go to the earth and enjoy your sleep, one who awakens you would be reduced to ashes“.
After this, king Muchukunda descended to earth and selected a cave, where he could sleep without being disturbed.

Kalayavan (Yavana/Yona/Greek) warrior king was undefeated and unmatched in battle due to a boon, but he was also merciless and cruel. 
He learns that Krishna is the only person who can defeat him in battle and accepting this challenge sets out to invade Krishna’s kingdom, Mathura. When the two armies faced each other in battle, Krishna dismounts from his chariot and starts walking away, followed by Kalayavan. After a long time Krishna, followed by Kalayavan, enters a dark cave. In this cave Muchukunda was sleeping since the time he was blessed by king of deities.

The person on whom Muchkunda’s gaze falls is doomed to instantaneous death. Kalayavan in a fit of anger and unable to see in the dark attacks Muchukunda mistaking him to be Krishna. When Muchkunda opens his eyes, his gaze falls on Kalayavan who is immediately burnt to death. Krishna appears to Muchukunda in form of Ananta Padmanabha Swamy (same position in which muchukunda slept for many years).
The river which starts its flow from near that cave is now known as Muchukunda Nadi(River). In time lapse, it is known as Moosi (Musi) River, which flows through Hyderabad in Deccan Plateau, India.

Gandasailavalokanam in Tripura Rahasya (naratted by Dattatreya to Parasurama)

Tripura Rahasya, the ultimate book on Advaita Vedanta discusses a chapter about time-travel.
Mahasena, brother of Vanga King Sushena sent his army along with horse to perform Aswamedha Yagam.
When the army crossed a sage named Tangana, who was in meditation, they did not pay respect to him and proceeded further. Sage’s son noticed the insult to his father and was exasperated. He caught the sacrificial horse and fought the heroes guarding it.
They surrounded him on all sides but he together with the horse entered a hill (Gandasaila), before their eyes. Noticing his disappearance in the hill, the invaders attacked the hill. The sage’s son re-appeared with a huge army, fought the enemy, defeated them and destroyed Susena’s army. He took many prisoners of war, including all the princes and then re-entered the hill. A few followers who escaped fled to Sushena and told him everything. Sushena was surprised and said to his brother to respect the sage and bring back the horse.

Knowing the problem of king, Tangana asked his son to release the horse. But even after that Mahasena was curious to know how huge army emerged from inside a hill.
Tangana’s son made Mahasena leave his physical body outside the hill and took his ativahika sarira (astral body) inside.
As he entered, Mahasena saw the sky above, enveloped in the darkness of night and shining with stars. He ascended there and looked down below; he came to the region of the moon and was benumbed with cold. Protected by the saint, he went up to the Sun and was scorched by its rays. Again tended by the saint, he was refreshed and saw the whole region a counterpart of the Heaven. He went up to the summits of the Himalayas with the saint and was shown the whole region and also the earth. Again endowed with powerful eye-sight, he was able to see far-off lands and discovered other worlds besides this one. In the distant worlds there was darkness prevailing in some places; the earth was gold in some; there were oceans and island continents traversed by rivers and mountains; there were the heavens peopled by Indra and the Gods, the asuras, human beings, the rakshasas and other races of celestials. He also found that the saint had divided himself as Brahma in Satyaloka, as Vishnu in Vaikunta, and as Siva in Kailasa while all the time he remained as his original-self the king ruling in the present world. The king was struck with wonder on seeing the yogic power of the saint. The sage’s son said to him: ‘This sightseeing has lasted only a single day according to the standards prevailing here, whereas 1,200,000,000 years have passed by in the world you are used to. So let us return to my father.‘

Outside the hill, sage’s son made Mahasena go into sleep and united his astral body with the preserved physical body.
When Mahasena wokeup, he found the whole world to have changed.
Upon realizing that all his relatives and friends were dead during that time period, Mahasena goes into depression.
Tangana’s son takes him around the hill and says ‘See this hill’s circumference is just 1 mile, but you have seen a huge universe inside. Now what can you call as reality ?
How can you judge if one dream is reality of actually a dream, based on another dream ?
Both are dreams and reality is YOU.‘

Thus Mahasena was taught yoga and advaita philosophy.

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Pythagorus theorem was discovered by Indians and not by Pythagoras

 www.hinduisminfo.com/2009/01/indians-discovered-pythagorus-theorem.html

Yes, ancient Indians mathematicians discovered Pythagoras theorem! This might come as a surprise to many, but it's true that Pythagoras theorem was known much before Pythagoras and it was Indians who actually discovered it at least 1000 years before Pythagoras was born! It seems that Pythagoras stole this theorem from India and was given credit for it. It's one of the many examples of cases when Greek mathematicians/scientists took credit of various Indian discoveries/inventions and the original Indian contributers were forgotten.
So which Indian mathematician discovered Pythagoras theorem originally? We now know that it was Baudhāyana who discovered the Pythagoras theorem. Baudhāyana listed Pythagoras theorem in his book called Baudhāyana Śulbasûtra (800 BCE). Incidentally, Baudhāyana Śulbasûtra is also one of the oldest books on advanced Mathematics. The actual shloka (verse) in Baudhāyana Śulbasûtra that describes Pythagoras theorem is given below -

dīrghasyākṣaṇayā rajjuH pārśvamānī, tiryaDaM mānī, cha yatpṛthagbhUte kurutastadubhayāṅ karoti.

Interestingly, Baudhāyana used a rope as an example in the above shloka which can be translated as - A rope stretched along the length of the diagonal produces an area which the vertical and horizontal sides make together. As you see, it becomes clear that this is perhaps the most intuitive way of understanding and visualizing Pythagoras theorem (and geometry in general) and Baudhāyana seems to have simplified the process of learning by encapsulating the mathematical result in a simple shloka in a layman's language (sanskrit was the language of choice back then).
Some people might say that this is not really an actual mathematical proof of Pythagoras theorem though and it is possible that Pythagoras provided that missing proof. But if we look in the same Śulbasûtra, we find that the proof of Pythagoras theorem has been provided by both Baudhāyana and Āpastamba in the Sulba Sutras! To elaborate, the shloka is to be translated as -

The diagonal of a rectangle produces by itself both (the areas) produced separately by its two sides.

The implications of the above statement are profound because it is directly translated into Pythagorean theorem (and graphically represented in the picutre on the left) and it becomes evident that Baudhāyana proved Pythagoras theorem using area calculation and not geometry (as shown in the picture on left). Since most of the later proofs (presented by Euclid and others) are geometrical in nature, the Sulba Sutra's numerical proof was unfortunately ignored. As I mentioned before though, Baudhāyana was not the only Indian mathematician to have provided pythagorean triplets and proof. Āpastamba also provided the proof for Pythagoras theorem, which again is numerical in nature but again unfortunately this vital contribution has been ignored and Pythagoras was wrongly credited by Cicero and early Greek mathematicians for this theorem. For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that Baudhāyana also presented a geometrical proof using isosceles triangles so, to be more accurate, we attribute the geometrical proof to Baudhāyana and numerical (using number theory and area computation) proof to Āpastamba. Also, another ancient Indian mathematician called Bhaskara later provided a unique geometrical proof as well (picuture illustrating Bhaskara's proof on right) which is known for the fact that it's truly generalized and works for all sorts of triangles and is not incongruent (not just isosceles as in some older proofs).
One thing that is really interesting is that Pythagoras was not credited for this theorem till atleast three centuries after! It was much later when Cicero and other greek philosophers/mathematicians/historians decided to tell the world that it was Pythagoras that came up with this theorem! How utterly ridiculous! In fact, later on many historians have tried to prove the relation between Pythagoras theorem and Pythagoras but have failed miserably. In fact, the only relation that historians have been able to trace it to is with Euclid, who again came many centuries after Pythagoras! This fact itself means that they just wanted to use some of their own to name this theorem after and discredit the much ancient Indian mathematicians without whose contribution it could've been impossible to create the very basis of algebra and geometry!
Many historians have also presented evidence for the fact that Pythagoras actually travelled to Egypt and then India and learned many important mathematical theories (including Pythagoras theorem) that western world didn't know of back then! So, it's very much possible that Pythagoras learned this theorem during his visit to India but hid his source of knowledge he went back to greece! This would also partially explain why greeks were so reserved in crediting Pythagoras with this theorem!
Looking at the implications of such fundamental laws like Pythagorean theorem that have been so grossly wrongly credited to greek mathematicians who have nothing to do with them, I wonder how many more other important ancient Indian discoveries and inventions have been wrongly credited so far!

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10 Reasons Why Our Universe Is A Virtual Reality

Physical realism is the view that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone. Most people think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of physics for some time now. The paradoxes that baffled physics last century still baffle it today, and its great hopes of string theory and supersymmetry aren’t leading anywhere.

In contrast, quantum theory works, but quantum waves that entangle, superpose, then collapse to a point are physically impossible—they must be “imaginary.” So for the first time in history, a theory of what doesn’t exist is successfully predicting what does—but how can the unreal predict the real?

Quantum realism is the opposite view—that the quantum world is real and is creating the physical world as a virtual reality. Quantum mechanics thus predicts physical mechanics because it causes them. Physics saying that quantum states don’t exist is like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Quantum realism isn’t The Matrix, where the other world making ours was also physical. Nor is it a brain-in-a-vat idea, as this virtuality was in play long before humans came along. Nor is it that a phantom other world modifies ours—our physical world is the phantom. In physical realism, the quantum world is impossible, but in quantum realism the physical world is impossible—unless it is a virtual reality—as these examples demonstrate.

10. Our Universe Began

Physical Realism: Everyone has heard of the Big Bang, but if the physical universe is all there is, how did it begin? A complete universe shouldn’t change overall, as there is nowhere else for it to go to or come from, and nothing else that can alter it. Yet in 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hubble found that all the galaxies were expanding away from us, implying a Big Bang that happened at a point in space-time over 14 billion years ago. The discovery of cosmic background radiation all around us (seen as static on our TV screens) confirmed that not only did our entire universe begin at that point, but its space and time began then as well.

Now, a universe that began either existed before its creation to make itself, which is impossible, or it was made by something else. It is impossible that a complete universe began by itself, from nothing. Yet oddly enough, this is what most physicists today believe. They suggest the first event was a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum (in quantum mechanics, pairs of particles and antiparticles are known to hop in and out of existence). But if matter just popped out of space, what did space pop out of? How can a quantum fluctuation in space create space? How can time itself begin?

Quantum Realism: Every virtual reality boots up with a first event that also begins its space and time. In this view, the Big Bang was when our physical universe booted up, including its space-time operating system. Quantum realism suggests that the big bang was really the big rip.

9. Our Universe Has A Maximum Speed

Physical Realism: Einstein deduced that nothing goes faster than light in a vacuum from how our world behaves, and this has subsequently been considered a universal constant, but it isn’t clear why this is the case. Currently: “the speed of light is a constant because it just is, and because light is not made of anything simpler.”

To answer “Why can’t things go faster and faster?” with “Because they can’t” is hardly satisfactory. Light slows down in water or glass, and when it moves in water we say the medium is water, and when it moves in glass we say the medium is glass, but when it moves in empty space we fall silent. How can a wave vibrate nothing? There is no physical basis for light to move in empty space at all, let alone define the fastest speed possible.

Quantum Realism: If the physical world is a virtual reality, it is the product of information processing. Information is defined as a choice from a finite set, so the processing changing it must also be finite, and indeed our world does refresh at a finite rate. A supercomputer processor refreshes 10 quadrillion times a second, and our universe refreshes a trillion, trillion times faster than that, but the principle is the same. As a screen image has pixels and a refresh rate, so our world has Planck Length and Planck Time.

In this scenario, the speed of light is the fastest speed because the network can’t transmit anything faster than one pixel per cycle—i.e., Planck Length divided by Planck Time, or about 300,000 kilometers per second. The speed of light should really have been called the speed of space.

8. Our Time Is Malleable

Physical Realism: In Einstein’s twin paradox, one twin traveling in a rocket at nearly the speed of light returns a year later to find his twin brother an old man of 80. Neither twin knew their time ran differently and neither lost a heartbeat, but one’s life is nearly over and the other’s is just starting. This seems impossible in an objective reality, but time really does slow down for particles in accelerators. In the 1970s, scientists flew atomic clocks on aircraft around the world to prove they ticked slower than synchronized ones on the ground. But how can time, the arbiter of all change, itself be subject to change?

Quantum Realism: A virtual reality would be subject to virtual time, where each processing cycle is one “tick.” Every gamer knows that when the computer is busy the screen lags—game time slows down under load. Likewise, time in our world slows down with speed or near massive bodies, suggesting that it is virtual. So the rocket twin only aged a year because that was all the processing cycles the system busy moving him could spare. What changed was his virtual time.

7. Our Space Curves

Physical Realism: According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Sun keeps the Earth in orbit by curving space around it, but how can space itself curve? Space by definition is that in which movement occurs, so for space to curve it has to exist in another space, which is an infinite regression. If matter exists in a space of nothing, for that nothing to move (or curve) is impossible.

Quantum Realism: An “idle” computer isn’t really idle but busy running a null program, and our space could be the same. In the Casimir effect, the vacuum of space exerts a pressure on two flat plates close together. Current physics says that virtual particles pop out of nowhere to cause this, but in quantum realism empty space is full of processing that would have the same effect. And space as a processing network can present a three-dimensional surface capable of curving.

6. Randomness Happens

Physical Realism: In quantum theory, quantum collapse is random, so a radioactive atom can emit a photon whenever it wants to. A random event is one that no prior physical story explains. Quantum theory also holds that a physical event requires a random “collapse of the wave function,” so every physical event has a random element!

To meet this threat to the primacy of physical causation, in 1957 Hugh Everett proposed the many-worlds theory, the untestable idea that every quantum choice spawns a new universe, so every option actually occurs somewhere in a new “multiverse.” For example, if you chose toast for breakfast, nature makes another universe where you had peaches and cream. It was initially seen as ridiculous, which it is, but physicists today prefer this physics fairytale over other options because it dispels the nightmare of randomness.

Yet if quantum choices create new universes, it isn’t hard to see that “universes would be piling up at rates that transcend all concepts of infinitude.” The many-worlds fantasy doesn’t just offend Occam’s razor, it outrages it. Actually, the multiverse is just a reincarnation of the old perfectly predictable clockwork universe, which quantum theory disposed of last century. False theories don’t die, they just become zombie theories.

Quantum Realism: The processor in an online game can generate a value random to it, and our world could be the same. So quantum events are random to us because they involve client-server acts we have no access to. Quantum randomness seems pointless, but it plays the same role in the evolution of matter as genetic randomness does in biological evolution.

5. Antimatter Occurs

Physical Realism: Antimatter refers to subatomic particles corresponding to the electrons, protons, and neutrons of regular matter, but with the opposite electric charge and other properties. In our universe, negative electrons orbit positive atomic nuclei. In an anti-matter universe, positive electrons would orbit negative nuclei, but it would look the same to its inhabitants as the laws of physics would be the same. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact.

Paul Dirac’s equations predicted antimatter before it was found, but it was never clear why something that annihilates matter is even possible. The Feynman diagram of an electron meeting an anti-electron shows the latter entering the collision going back in time! As so often in physics today, the equation works but its implications make no sense. Matter doesn’t need an inverse, and time reversal undermines the causal foundations of physics. Antimatter is one of the most baffling findings of modern physics.

Quantum Realism: If matter is the result of processing and processing sets a sequence of values, it follows that those values can be set in reverse—processing implies anti-processing. In this light, antimatter is the inevitable by-product of matter created by processing. If time is the completion of forward processing cycles for matter, for antimatter it is the completion of backward cycles, so it logically runs our time in reverse. Matter has an inverse because the processing that creates it is reversible, and anti-timeoccurs for the same reason. Only a virtual time can have an inverse.

4. The Two Slit Experiment

Physical Realism: Over 200 years ago, Thomas Young did an experiment that still baffles physicists today—he shone light through two parallel slits to get an interference pattern on a screen. Only waves do this, so a light particle (photon) must be actually be a wave. But the light also hits the screen at a point, which would only happen if a photon is a particle.

To find out more, physicists sent one photon at a time through Young’s slits. One photon gave the expected particle dot, but soon the dots built up into an interference pattern whose most likely impact point was behind the slit barrier! The effect is independent of time—so one photon going through the slits each year gives the same pattern. Each photon can’t know where the last one hit, so how does the pattern emerge? Detectors placed in either or both slits, to see where the photon goes, just fire half the time—a photon always goes by one slit or the other, never through both. In nature’s conspiracy of silence, a physical photon is a particle when we look but a wave when we don’t.

Current physics calls this the mystery of wave-particle duality, a “deeply weird” fact explainable only by esoteric equations of non-existent waves. Yet we all know that point particles can’t spread like waves and spreading waves can’t be point particles.

Quantum Realism: Quantum theory explains Young’s experiment with fictional waves that go through both slits, interfere, then collapse to a point at the screen. It works, but waves that don’t exist can’t explain what does. In quantum realism, a photon program can spread instances on the network like a wave, then restart at a point when a node overloads and reboots, like a particle. That what we call physical reality is that set of reboots explains both quantum waves and quantum collapse.

3. Dark Energy And Dark Matter

Physical Realism: Current physics describes the matter we see, but the universe also has five times as much of something called dark matter. It can be detected as a halo around the black hole at the center of our galaxy that binds its stars together more tightly than their gravity allows. It isn’t the matter we see as no light can detect it, it isn’t anti-matter as it has no gamma ray signature, and it isn’t a black hole as there is no gravitational lensing—but without it, the stars of our galaxy would fly apart in chaos.

No known particles explain dark matter—hypothetical particles known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) have been proposed, but none have been found, despite talk of super-WIMPs. In addition, 70 percent of the universe is dark energy, and physics can’t explain that either. Dark energy is a sort of negative gravity, a weak effect spread through space that pushes things apart, thereby increasing the universe’s expansion. It hasn’t changed much over time, but something floating in an expanding space should gradually weaken. If it were a property of space then it should increase as space expands. Currently, no one has any idea what it is.

Quantum Realism: If empty space is null processing then it is not nothing, and if it is expanding then new space is being added all the time. New processing points, by definition, receive input but output nothing in their first cycle. So they absorb but don’t emit, exactly like the negative effect we call dark energy. If new space adds at a steady rate, the effect won’t change much over time, so dark energy is caused by the ongoing creation of space. The model also attributes dark matter to light in orbit around a black hole. It is a halo because light too close to the black hole is pulled into it and light too far away from it can escape the orbit. Quantum realism expects that no particles will ever be found to explain dark energy and dark matter.

2. Electrons Tunnel

Physical Realism: In our world, an electron can suddenly pop up outside a Gaussian field it can’t penetrate, which is like a coin in a perfectly sealed glass bottle suddenly appearing outside it. In a purely physical world this isn’t possible, but in our world it is.

Quantum Realism: Quantum theory requires an electron to occasionally do the above because a quantum wave can spread regardless of physical barriers, and an electron can randomly collapse to any point in it. Each collapse is an image frame in the movie we call physical reality, except that the next frame isn’t fixed, but randomly based on probabilities. So an electron “tunneling” through an impenetrable field is like a movie that “cuts” from a view of an actor inside a house to outside.

That might sound odd, but teleporting from one state to another is how all quantum matter moves. We see a physical world that exists independent of our observation, but quantum theory’s observer effect implies it almost works like a game view, where if you look left a left view is created and if you look right a right view is shown. In Bohm’s Theory, a ghostly quantum wave guides the electron, but in this theory the electron is that ghostly wave. Quantum realism solves the quantum paradox by making the quantum world real and the physical world its product.

1. Quantum Entanglement

Physical Realism: If a cesium atom releases two photons in opposite directions, quantum theory “entangles” them, so that if one is spinning upward, the other will spin downward. But if one is randomly spinning up, how does the other instantly know to spin down, at any distance? To Einstein, the discovery that measuring one photon’s spin instantly defines the spin of another anywhere in the universe was “spooky action at a distance.” The test of this was one of the most careful experiments ever done, as befits the ultimate test of our reality, and quantum theory was right yet again. Observing one entangled photon caused the other to have the opposite spin—even when it was too far away for a signal traveling at the speed of light to connect them. Nature could conserve spin by making one photon up and the other down from at the start, but that is apparently too much trouble. So it lets either spin either way, randomly, then when we measure one to be one way, it instantly makes the other the opposite, even though that is physically impossible.

Quantum Realism: In this view, two photons entangle when their programs merge to jointly run two points. If one program is spin-up and the other spin-down, their merger runs both pixels wherever they are. A physical event at either pixel restarts either program randomly, leaving the remaining opposite spin code to run the other pixel. This code re-allocation ignores distance, as a processor doesn’t have to “go to” a pixel to change it, even for a screen as big as our universe.

The standard model of physics involves 61 fundamental particles with data-fitted mass and charge parameters. If it were a machine, one would have to hand-set two dozen knobs just right for it to light up. It also needs five invisible fields to spawn 14 virtual particles with 16 different “charges” to work. You might expect completeness from all this, but the standard model can’t explain gravity, proton stability, anti-matter, quark charges, neutrino mass or spin, inflation, family generations, or quantum randomness—all critical issues. No particles account for the dark energy and dark matter that comprises most of the universe—and no particles ever will.

Quantum realism reinterprets the equations of quantum theory in terms of one network and one program. Its premise, that the physical world is a processing output, doesn’t make it a fake, as there is still a real world out there—it just isn’t the one we see. Reverse engineering the physical world suggests that matter evolved from light, as a standing quantum wave, so quantum realism predicts that light alone in a vacuum can collide to create matter. In contrast, the standard model says that photons can’t collide, so a definitive test of the virtual reality conjecture is possible. When light alone collides in a vacuum to create matter, the particle model will be replaced by one based on information processing. See this FAQ for common questions, go here for more details, or listen to this Chronicle of Higher Education podcast: Imagining Our World As A Virtual Reality.

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scholarship

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