Dance of Shiva

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In the plaza outside the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, stands a human-size statue of the deity Shiva. A more fitting image of the meeting of Eastern spirituality and Western science is hard to imagine. Inside the CERN fortress, subatomic particles are made to accelerate and collide, as physicists ponder the origins of the universe. Outside , under the sun and stars, stands Vedic cosmology in symbolic form. Depicted as Nataraja, the lord of Dance, Shiva stands with his right foot planted on a slayed demon, symbolizing the destruction of ignorance. His raised left leg, his four arms, and his torqued body are frozen in perfect balance, as if captured midwhirl in a photo. Take as a whole, it depicts cosmic creation and destruction, in which infinite dynamism coexists with eternal, changless Being. “It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of,” said the philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. That quote is etched on the statue’s pedestal, along with one from physicist Fritjof Capra, author of the seminal bestseller “The Tao of Physics”: “In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unified ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.”

As some physicists delved deeper and deeper into the substructure of the atom, unveiling a whirligig of abstract energies, others turned their sights to the sky and discovered an expanding universe of seemingly infinite space and time Some imaginative physicists recognized that thie two-prolonged expansion of awareness parallels that of yogis in meditation: inward to the deepest layers of mind and outward to infinite consciousness. They also saw that each style of inquiry is an attempt to discern ultimate unity: physics in the still-to-be-formulated unified field theory; mystics in the Upnishadic maxim “All this is That.” The more adventurour found intriguing parallels between Eastern metaphysics and quantum mechanics, each of which demonstrates in its own way that reality is not exactly what we perceive through our ordinary senses. ~ Pages 283/284 (“American Veda” – Philip Goldberg)

Our universe is one whose basic physical constants -- the gravitational constant, the size of the positive and negative charges on electrons and protons, the ratio of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces -- have allowed it to last a long time (by our standards). It shall show no sign of collapsing. It has been around long enough to produce its 70 sextillion stars after about 13 billion years. On one minor rock circling one below-average star, it resulted in us Homo sapiens and some other stuff. One remarkable thing about this best current cosmological theory is the degree to which physicists have been able to subject it to many empirical tests, including tests on its claims about things that happened even before the big bang, let alone before the formation of the Earth, our sun, or even our galaxy, the milky Way. One of the most striking was the successful prediction of where to look for radiation from stars that went supernova and exploded as far back as 10 billion years ago. These tests came out so favourably to the big bang theory that physiciss decided to risk several billion euros on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN outside Geneva, to test the big bang theory directly by creating the very conditions that occurred just after the big bang. - page 37 "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" ~ Alex Rosenberg