The Vedas and the God Particle

The Vedas and the God Particle

Where do we come from and where are we headed? Is there a God or a something super human, which is controlling our destiny? How did it all begin and how is it going to end? These are some of the questions that has plagued man ever since he developed consciousness and rational thought, all those thousands of years ago. Philosophers and thinkers have delved into this question and came out with numerous interpretations, some more obtuse than the other. For a commoner like me, the question of existence or origins or demise of man is not really easy to understand let alone question.

Listening to a learned priest explain to me the reasoning behind dispersal of ashes and the rituals got me interested in some of these questions. The five ‘Mahabhutas’, he explained, form the material body while living and merge into the cosmos or the Bramhan on our death. The five elements – earth, wind, fire, water and akasha or aether merge with the cosmos to keep the balance of nature. The idea of cremation, he said, is to allow the five energies of our body to merge into the cosmic energy. The ritual following that is to help the onward journey of the soul towards Bramhan. For a scientist who seeks tangible evidence for everything, this was difficult to absorb. He said I could find the evidence in the Vedas.

Initial research brought me across that iconic sage/philosopher, Swami Vivekananda. He explains the same in little bit further in his book – “It is (Akasha) is omnipresent, all penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this akasha. It is this akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids that becomes the solids.” This will take some digesting, I thought.

Reading the Vedas and understanding them are two entirely different concepts. It is written or composed in an archaic Sanskrit, not too dissimilar to the Avestan of ancient Persians. Expert Sanskrit scholars struggle with the writing and in the past many western scholars have discarded the writings in these scriptures as ‘garbled messages of a deranged mind’ and “writings of a mind muddled by the esoteric Soma”, which they considered probably an extract from Muscaria Amanita, a psychogenic mushroom. Experts also tell me that the Vedas have all the knowledge we need and can answer any of the questions. But I was disappointed to find out that more than 60% of Rigveda has not been properly deciphered or understood. Sayana was probably the first one to write a treatise on Rigveda during 14th century in the court of Vijayanagara Empire of Bukka. It has been used as basis of many works by noted researchers like Max Muller and Ralph Griffiths. Since then there have been numerous attempts at deciphering these vast treatise – probably the largest scripture in the world.
While researching into modern interpretation of the Rigveda, I came across many eminent physicists who were interested in the ancient scriptures. There are too many to list here. That made me curious enough to investigate what the modern scientists say about the origin of the universe and maybe its eventual outcome or end result. This started my foray into quantum physics, and I must admit that I was lost in no time. Where did we come from? We have all heard about the Big Bang theory – no not the comedy programme! According to this theory the universe came into being with an almighty bang about 13.6 billion years ago when a tiny particle blew up and spread the pieces out at unbelievable speeds into a quantum vacuum. The assumption here is that there was nothing before the Big Bang and it was darkness.

Einstein studied the Vedas and felt there was an answer to his problems with theory of relativity and his idea of cosmological constant. Newtonian laws of physics had been at the helm till Einstein described the theory of relativity in the early twentieth century. But, the discovery of quantum mechanics turned the world of physics upside down.
Democritus said that the universe is made up of tiny indivisible blocks of matter called the “atom” in 5th century BCE. Ernest Rutherford from, Manchester split the atom and found the Proton in 1907. Then came the discovery of two other – electrons and neutrons and for a long time it was thought that they were the “basic particles” from which everything in this universe was made of. Electrons, protons etc were not the basic particles. Out comes the “quanta,” that minute particle the entire universe is made of. The term “quanta” was coined by Max Planck in 1841 long before the atom was split. The quantum physics changed the laws of physics at the sub-atomic level with “fields”, “waves” and “particles or quarks.” These defied all the known theories of Newtonian physics and confounded scientists. Even the cosmological constant of Einstein which was used to explain why the galaxies were racing away from the centre, which was thrown in the bucket was resurrected. Werner Heisenberg who described his famous Uncertainty Principle in the 1920’s said “Quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta.”

Interesting fact about this quantum particle is that it has its own physical properties, one of which is that you can’t measure two dimensions of the particle at any given time. And it can travel at unbelievable speeds, faster than speed of light. Yes, you read it right. In fact, thousands of times faster than speed of light. This goes against the laws of Physics as we know it. These particles have that funny quality of “entanglement” which is difficult to comprehend for mortals like me. According to this, two quanta, once placed in a similar state are in touch with each other no matter where they are – both space and time wise. It could be few seconds or million years and also few millimetres or several light years apart. This was demonstrated by a theoretical experiment devised by three scientists – Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen – called the EPR experiment in 1934. They showed that there is an “entanglement” of particles, which stays with them wherever they are. This stayed a theoretical experiment until technology improved enough to measure the characteristics of particles some 50 years later. In simple words two particles being measured do not have a specific state until they are measured. If there are two particles A and B in an “entangled state” even for a brief period, it did not matter how far they move away from each other they will be in a complementary state, whichever it may be. If particle’s state is being measured and particle A shows an upward spin, particle B will be in a downward spin, no matter how far away they are from each other. What does this mean for us? Again in simple words, everything in the universe “knows” everything else in the universe.
The space around our planets and stars or the quantum vacuum, so far thought to be empty, is not empty after all. It is filled with these quantum particles and several fields – gravitational field, universal force field, Zero point field, Higgs field etc. They tell me that the fiery cloud that raced out of this tiny particle at the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago broke up into matter and antimatter. This is where the problem starts. In theory this should produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But. if there was equal amount, there would be nothing as they would cancel out each other. But there is significantly more mater than antimatter in the universe. This is further complicated by the Dark matter and Dark energy. The amount of gravitational field that has been detected far outweighs the amount of matter (the only thing that can produce gravity) that is present in the universe. Even counting for adding “Dark matter” into the equation does not add up to the amount of gravitational force that is present. There must be something else that is producing this enormous amount of gravitational force in the universe. So far scientists have not been able to explain the cause for this.
The physicists tell me that the quantum particles, which were once thought to be packets of energy, are in the form of uni-dimensional strings vibrating like tuning forks – so called String theory. Now comes the interesting part – quantum vacuum is not really empty. It is filled with these quantum particles and energy fields. – a force clashes with the field to produce these particles and in turn the atoms, molecules, cells and organisms and so on. These particles are called Fermions and Bosons (named after the Indian physicist, Satyandranath Bose). Fermions are the Protons and Neutrons that we have read about in school, and both have a charge and a mass. They are usually groups into two types – Quarks and Leptons. The Bosons are Gauge and Higgs particles. They are essentially carriers of the four fundamental forces of Universe – Gravity, Electro-magnetic force, Strong and Weak forces. Gauge bosons are the carriers of these forces. Until 2012, Higgs boson was only a theoretical prediction. Peter Higgs predicted that it is this boson, which gives elementary particles their mass and would explain how mass came into being after the Big Bang.

Let us spend a minute or two on this Higgs boson, also called Higgs particle. This is the carrier particle, or boson, of the Higgs field, a field that permeates space and endows all elementary subatomic particles with mass through its interactions with them. The field and the particle—named after Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, one of the physicists who in 1964 first proposed the mechanism—provided a testable hypothesis for the origin of mass in elementary particles. In popular culture the Higgs boson is often called the “God particle,” after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman’s The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Lederman claims that the discovery of Higgs boson is crucial to understanding the structure of matter of essential particles and hence the origin of Universe itself. Lederman regretted calling it the God particle due to its connotations but was forced to use it by his editor. His name for the book was actually “Goddamn particle”!
The Higgs field has the unusual property that its energy is higher when the field is zero than when it is nonzero. The elementary particles therefore acquired their masses through interactions with a nonzero Higgs field only when the universe cooled and became less energetic in the aftermath of the big bang(the hypothetical primal explosion in which the universe originated). The variety of masses characterizing the elementary subatomic particles arises because different particles have different strengths of interaction with the Higgs field.

Just when I thought I had the basic understanding of Quantum Physics, I come across the Quantum field theory. This states that everything in the form of “waves” and escribed using “wave functions”. In effect everything in the universe is in the form of continuous sheets and that is why the “particles” know every other “particle. They tell me that the so called “particles” are in effect upward or downward effects on the field by the force. This is when I gave up and stopped looking further.

This conveniently brings us to the Hindu understanding of the Bramhan or the universal truth. If we accept that principle of Big Bang Theory that everything in this universe was generated in an instant from a singularity and that everything in the universe is “linked” to everything else in the universe, it is not far removed from the Vedic principle of Bramhan or the universal being from which everything in the universe was created and everything will merge into Bramhan. Now, to make it more interesting, if you accept that the eventually, in a few billion years’ time, the universe is going to collapse on itself into singularity due to the gravitational pull, it is not far removed from the concept of us merging into the Bramhan as the ultimate reality.
Let us now look at these Vedic texts in a little more detail to see if they are really “garbled messages” of a drug muddled mind.” Of the ten books or “Mandalas”, 1st and 10th are the youngest. I was pointed two Suktas (Hymns) – Nasadiya Sukta and Purusha Sukta. Nasadiya Sukta is part of the 10th book, begins with “There was neither non-existence nor existence then.” This is no different to the principle of the Big Bang theory, there was nothing before and everything started from a singularity. Let us get to that a later.
‘Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden’ Again, the quantum physics tells us that the light came on after the Big Bang where there was no light before. This happened after the photons were formed and released with an unimaginable force.
‘That which, becoming, by the voice was covered; That one by force of heat came into being.’ The quantum physics (for a layman), says that the interaction of fundamental forces on the fields within the quantum vacuum generated particles with mass (quarks)which then go on to produce Electron, Protons, elements, molecules and eventually complex structures including living beings.
‘Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe’ – I cannot see this being any different to the first few moments after the Big Bang when the stars, galaxies and planets formation.
Purusha sukta is also from the 10th book of Rigveda. This is still used regularly by priests across India during their daily rituals. The Purusha is defined in verses 2 to 5 of the Sukta. He is described as a being who pervades everything conscious and unconscious universally. Creation is described to have started with the origination of Virat, or the cosmic body from the Purusha. I presume this must be the same as Bramhan. In Virat, omnipresent intelligence manifests itself as a “man”. In the verses following, it is explained how the rest of the universe, sun, moon, sky, seas, animals and plants were created by “sacrifice of the Purusha”. Through this creation, underlying unity of human, cosmic and divine realities is explained, for all are seen arising out of the one and only Purusha.
Vivekananda goes on to explain – “At the beginning of creation there is only akasha. At the end of the cycle the solid, the liquids, and the gases all melt into the akasha again, and the next creation similarly proceeds out of this akasha.….” Now this brings us to interesting concept of Multiverse and cyclical universe as proposed by nuclear physicists. According to this theory, the universe began in a quantum vacuum in an incredible explosion – the Big Bang Theory – and will eventually collapse into nothingness in quantum vacuum. Only to begin another cycle, with a Big Bang. They conceptualise one or more universes forming out of this explosion, some with the physical laws similar to our universe and some with completely different set of laws. They go on to hypothesise that the new universe is born with the “information” from the previous universe, similar to our genetic inheritance.

Nikola Tesla wrote in his unpublished paper, “Man’s greatest achievement” – said, the space is filled with an “original medium”, comparing it to akasha. He goes on to state that this original medium, a kind of force field, becomes matter when acted upon by cosmic energy or Prana.  He was a forward thinker with immense amount of knowledge and his theories are being proven to be true almost everyday now.  I can now say that the Vedic seers and sages knew far more than what we know now and there is a lot to be learnt from them.  The were probably 5000 years before us in physical time but were thousands of years ahead of us in knowledge.  Higgs Boson may not be the “God Particle” which induces matter in this universe, but definitely is pointing us in the right directions towards an answer.

God particle

Atoms, molecules, cells, tissues and organs, man is made of
Material we see and feel, think we know what we are made of
No one knows where we come from or where we are headed
Less said about the soul the better, we know very little of

Sages tell me we are children of God, no questions asked
Philosophers say, we are what we are, nothing mattered
Space is vacuum, so we thought and were told nothing there
Scientists say everything is from quantum energy, matter turned

Truly a Socratic problem we face, unable to solve I swear
He paid for it with his life with Hemlock, a burden to bear
“I know that I know nothing” a paradox that Socrates said
Till the end he was a paradox himself, not really wrong, beware

We built our world around us, made our life and bread
Unaware of the true meaning of life and everything sacred
Built our souls, our ghouls and an unknown spectre of liturgy
Only to drown in the sea of incessant struggle for daily bread

Higgs Boson or God particle, Black matter and Black energy
Those energy particles are there and not there, a synergy
Invisible fields in the vacuum, cosmos in coherence, Big Bang
Brings us back to good old Socrates, quantum theory, his eulogy

Scriptures say dust-to-dust, ancient belief not very wrong
Beware of the soothsayer with his doomsday song
Alive today and forever, you, her, him, that and in everything
Cosmic matter from energy is constant, ever since the Big bang

We strive for wants and goals, often beyond everything
We came from nothing to be something and end in nothing
So, lose the anger, anguish, sorrow, jealousy and hatred
We came from nothing and to be sure, we are headed to nothing.

Shankar Kashyap