Jainism Eternal and Universal Path for Enlightenment

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari
Publisher: Research Institute of Scientific Secrets from Indian Oriental Scriptures Ahmedabad

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Jainism : The Eternal and Universal path for Enlightenment
entities to the biggest unfathomable entities. The smallest entity known at present are quarks although search for even smaller entities is continuing. The biggest is of course the universe, by definition, but currently scientists are talking of multiverses, which is actually a group of universes. Astronomical observations suggest that our Universe was formed some 14 billion years ago in Big Bang. It consists of over 200 billion galaxies, each of which consists of more than 100 billion stars and even more planetary (rocky) objects (Figure 7.1). All the matter in the Universe is made up of several thousands of chemical compounds, several hundreds of minerals and over a hundred elementary particles. The visible universe with all its diverse components is basically made up of some 118 elements (92 stable and long lived radioactive elements and about 26 short lived elements, synthesized by nuclear reactions in stars, but not naturally occurring on Earth now). The vast tree representing diversity of matter and life in the universe formed out of just a hundred odd elements, acting as the basic bricks compelled philosophers to hypothesise that the root cause of all the elements may be some smaller number of elementary particles, may be even just one. This principle was at the heart of Dalton's atomic theory. The initial search for these building blocks of matter were encouraging and was even taken to support this idea of one basic constituent of all matter and hydrogen was recognized as the atom out of which all the known elements could be formed. As the search for the ultimate constituents of matter continued, three particles, proton, electron and neutron were discovered from which all the 118 elements and their 2000 isotopes could be formed. This trinity could be used in different proportions to build the whole physical universe. This strengthened the belief in Ekantavad, i.e. one can give rise to many but as further research continued, serious problems arose. By the nineteen sixties, using large high energy accelerators, scientists were able to discover hundreds of elementary particles. Such large number of elementary particles could not be the building blocks for making just a hundred elements and therefore it was postulated that the so called elementary particles should be made up of only a few fundamental entities.
The visible universe (minerals, rocks, planets, stars galaxies etc or the gross world) follows the classical physics. Basically, the state of the gross universe can be determined by summing up the state of all its components. If mass (m), velocity (v) and position (x) of all the components are known, the state of the system can be determined by the proposition that the whole is the sum of parts.