Jainism Eternal and Universal Path for Enlightenment

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

Page 74

Jainism : The Eternal and Universal path for Enlightenment
Whole=
(m,v, x)parts
There are only few attributes of the objects of the physical world: mass (and energy) and form (shape), which also change with time. The origin of mass is still not understood. Ernst Mach made an attempt to explain it by what is known after him as Mach's Principle. Broadly speaking Mach's principle states that the inertial mass of a body is solely due to interaction of other bodies in the universe. Heller mentions it in the following way "The local inertial frames are entirely determined by the distribution and motion of all matter present in the universe" and Einstein formulated it as “the entire inertia of a point mass is the effect of the presence of all other masses, deriving from a kind of interaction from the latter” There is yet no "proof for this principle but Einstein is said to have derived much inspiration from the Mach's principle in development of his Theory of Relativity.
As we go to the level of molecules and elementary particles, the classical physics fails to hold and quantum physics has to be invoked and some new principles come into play. Thus there is a division between physical laws of classical physics, applicable to the gross universe, roughly bigger than an atom, and the quantum physics applicable to the subtle world, consisting of elementary particles and the micro universe. In classical physics, a proposition that “a particle is at position x” is either true or false. In contrast, in quantum physics, the best that can be said is that if a measurement of position is made, the probability that the particle will be at a position x would lie between 0 to 1. Most concepts of common sense are not valid in quantum world.
More importantly, quantum world is not just a classical, mechanical, Newtonian world where processes follow the law of mechanics but it showed that there are qualities which are influenced by observation. There is something like behavior of particles which can change under observation. This is the first step towards understanding the interaction between jiva and ajiva. Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics puts severe constraints on certainty of our knowledge. Two tenets of quantum mechanics that are relevant here can be crudely described as follows. One is that the universe does not exist if you don't observe it, equivalent to the paradox of the Schrödinger's cat (for popular exposition, see e.g. Gribbin, 1993). This implies that universe and the observer exist as pairs and neither can exist without the other. The other concept is that a particle behaves in different ways at different times. This is clear