Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? - from the movie Matrix 1999
One way you can ensure that you are awake is by checking that the world around you behaves as expected-when you throw something up it comes down, when you fall it hurts as if the ground is hitting you with the same force as you hitting the ground, etc!
In a dream the constrains of physical world are no longer valid so things can move as they please and there is no place for a rational or logical connection between events-they can be completely contrary to our day-to-day perceptions.
Yet what we perceive is necessarily plagued with inaccuracies like the seeming flatness of earth or the daily extinguishment of the source of life on earth-our dear star, the sun! Perception without acknowledgement of limitations of the instruments of it often leads one to world views different from the actual reality of how things are! A careful investigation to account for and correct the nature of errors of perception by careful observation and experimentation however can revolutionize our worldview and awaken us to a new reality!
As the Bhagavad Gita propounds (2.69): what is pitch dark of the night to the civilians, to that the yogi is wide awake and what is bright and clear as daylight to the civilians escapes the yogi as if covered by night! Such was the story of Galileo who discovered that the world view held by Aristotle and his mentees for nearly two thousand years was incorrect, such was the story of Newton when he recognized that the moon was driven not by a force different from what ties us to the earth and such was the story of Einstein and Heisenberg who awakened to a deeper, quantum depiction of reality in which the Newtonian world view had to be discarded! These are our modern yogis, who push the limits for human thought and enquiry!
The elation one feels at the glimpse of such cognition, the flash of insight while solving a problem for example is like a movie preview for the bliss that yogis experience over meditative samadhi states! This humbling joy and deep sense of wonder which easily makes one forget the transient vagaries of our day to day world is what, perhaps, drives the physicist to engage in mind bending inquiry into Nature!
It is said, in an ancient sanskrit text called Shiva Sutras that wonder is the very basis on which a state of yoga emerges. ( Vismayo-yoga bhumika)
There is a cute anecdote of Einstein's interaction with an educator Rowe that highlights the role of the same wonder in driving the pursuit of scientific investigation!
Early one morning, on her school's annual visit to Princeton University's scientists and labs, a teen-aged Mary Budd Rowe came across Albert Einstein. He was gazing at a fountain, "tilting his head this way and that and sometimes moving his hands rapidly up and down."
"I stood beside him, puzzled," Rowe recalls. "He said nothing for quite some time. Then he turned to me and said, 'Can you do it? Can you stop the water enough to see the individual drops of water?'"
Einstein showed Rowe how to move her hands until she, too, could create a strobe effect that appeared to slow the stream to individual drops. They experimented a bit to get the best effect.
Then they turned and walked on.
"Never forget that science is just that kind of exploring and fun," he told her.
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Welcome to the wonderland-the Yoga of Physics!!
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