{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours","title":"Heisenberg Tagore Kolkata: When the Uncertainty Principle Met the Upanishads","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1193,"description":"On the afternoon of October 4 1929 a 28-year-old German physicist arrived at the house of a 68-year-old Indian poet in Kolkata.The physicist had two years earlier published the uncertainty principle, one of the most philosophically disturbing discoveries in the history of science. It had shaken the foundations of physics so completely that he himself could not fully make peace with what he had found. The mathematics was unambiguous. The implications were overwhelming. And nothing in the Western philosophical tradition within which he had been educated gave him a framework for understanding what his own equations were telling him about the nature of physical reality.The poet was one of the most celebrated minds of the 20th century. Nobel laureate. Composer of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. And a philosopher whose understanding of the relationship between consciousness and reality, between the observer and the observed, between the individual and the universe, was rooted in the Upanishadic tradition that the Indian subcontinent had been developing for three thousand years.Their names were Werner Heisenberg and Rabindranath Tagore.They talked for hours at Tagore's ancestral home at Jorasanko in North Kolkata. And when Heisenberg left he wrote to his parents the following day. In the afternoon I was the guest of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.Decades later Heisenberg told the physicist Fritjof Capra what those conversations had meant to him. After these conversations with Tagore he said some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.The man who had discovered that the act of observation changes the thing being observed found comfort and clarity in a philosophical tradition that had been saying exactly this for three thousand years. The most disturbing finding of 20th-century physics had already been anticipated by ancient...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eWrZ3doNBWF40S0S56sC17IDwfhLRtHiDkqKOrNCvtA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Yjg5/Y2Q3ODM2NzZkOTcz/NGJiMWMwMDEzMTFl/YjI3NC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}