Book Reviewed: Maya in Physics, by N. C. Panda

Connecting the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta with Quantum Reality

This book is documented with a good literature review, and the discussions are presented in a readable fashion to connect physical reality with laws of physics and Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. Much of the book is introductory in nature but relevant discussion is presented in the final chapters of the book.

The focus of discussion is the concept of Maya of Vedanta; the physical reality we experience, the cosmos, matter & energy, spacetime, living beings and consciousness are attributed to the illusory nature of Maya. It is a changing empirical reality conditioned by human mind, and the subjective nature, incorrectly interpret this as the final reality. Because the manifestation of Maya cloud the true nature of metaphysical reality called Brahman, which has no attributes. But it is an entity that encompasses Omniscience (infinite knowledge), Omnipotence (unlimited power), Omnipresence (present everywhere), Omni benevolence (perfect goodness), Immutable, Immortal, and Pure Consciousness. These qualities are personal and impersonal in nature that exists in spaceless and timeless dimensions. It is an unchanging reality amidst and beyond the realm of the universe. The Pure Consciousness is an entity that can transcend all possible laws of physics, all dimensions, all universal constants, and all physical realities in the multiverse.

In science, the physical reality is mainly experiential, that is mind, or a mind-like aspect creates reality, this is panpsychism. It also requires sentience or subjective experience to be included in the description of physical reality. Both classical and quantum physics explain reality in terms of the behavior of matter and energy in spacetime, but consciousness becomes involved in interpreting quantum reality. One of the lessons of Einstein's theory of relativity is the principle of "background independence", which argues against attributing any fixed, necessary features to spacetime when matter and energy are at play. They do not say whether time is moving forward or backwards. Nor do the laws identify a moment as “now.” Hence, the sense of a flow of time doesn’t exist , and the distinction between past, present and future is only a persistent illusion. Physicists like Erik Verlinde takes one more step to argue that spacetime and its curvature (gravity) is illusory. In fact, it is treated as an emergent phenomenon arising from the second law of thermodynamics; from the collective motion of small bits of information encoded on spacetime surfaces called holographic screens.

Fundamental particles have wave-particle duality, they exhibit both wave and particle behavior. Because of this, the quantum states exist in superpositions of different measurable quantities like position and velocity. But there are many possible positions, which take on definite values only when we observe them. Then, how can spacetime exist in a superposition of different possibilities? Further, fundamental particles like quark has never been observed but found only in confinement of composite states. Quantum field theories also predict existence of quantum foam, a state of vacuum that is unstable ripe with latent energy in which neither space nor time exists in a classical sense. In this state, there are virtual particles constantly popping in and out of existence (virtual pairs of particles and antiparticles), which are fluctuating fields and particles. They exist only momentarily. The principle of conservation of energy may be violated very briefly, since it is done in an extremely short time at quantum timescales.

There is another interpretation about virtual particle-antiparticle pair creation and annihilation. It is treated as a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past, and the principle of classical terms like "cause" and "effect" do not appear at Planck timescales. In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retro-causal (Backward causation).


Physicist Max Tegmark claims that quarks, atoms, and molecules are meaningless reductionism. He proposes that only the mathematical reality describe the behavior of matter, and not the other way around. The information generation architecture enables an agent to perform mental simulations for planning future action sequences for novel goals. This function of consciousness endows the agent with the ability to achieve novel goals that are difficult to attain only with a collection of reflexes. In addition, the methods of dynamical systems theory are derived from deterministic classical mechanics. In contrast, the methods of information theory are non-deterministic which are based on probabilities. Human consciousness is an emergent property. No single neuron holds complex information like self-awareness. But all neurons and the entire nervous system generate human behavior.

It follows from this discussion that physics at the heart of reality, spacetime and matter are unreal, but the information, statistics and mathematical realities are responsible for physical reality just as the Maya of Advaita Vedanta. One of the downside of this work is that this is confined to knowledge of physics of 1991 when this book was first published. Since then, physics literature has accumulated a good deal of information about the nature of spacetime which plays a cardinal role in the “wholeness” of physical reality.