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Sunil Malhotra's avatar

In the last century, the landscape of scientific inquiry was reshaped by groundbreaking discoveries that challenged the notion of complete objectivity. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Einstein’s relativity theories, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle all injected elements of subjectivity and human interpretation into the traditionally precise realms of mathematics and theoretical physics. These revelations suggested that the human element, with its inherent vagueness and subjectivity, could not be ignored in the pursuit of understanding the universe.

The following from Rebecca Goldstein’s book, Incompleteness, elucidates the Achilles heel of scientific objectivism:

"Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Einstein’s relativity theories. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The very names are tantalizingly suggestive, seeming to inject the softer human element into the hard sciences, seeming, even, to suggest that the human element prevails over those severely precise systems, mathematics and theoretical physics, smudging them over with our very own vagueness and subjectivity. The embrace of subjectivity over objectivity—of the “nothing-is-but-thinking-makes-it-so” or “man-is-the-measure-of-all-things” modes of reasoning—is a decided, even dominant, strain of thought in the twentieth-century’s intellectual and cultural life. The work of Gödel and Einstein—acknowledged by all as revolutionary and dubbed with those suggestive names—is commonly grouped, together with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as among the most compelling reasons modern thought has given us to reject the 'myth of objectivity'."

By dint of coincidence, incompleteness, relativity and uncertainty are the very words used by Vedic philosophers to describe Māyā, or the illusion of reality, and these are discoveries of physics in the twentieth century. Just as Vedic philosophers grappled with the limitations of human perception and understanding, modern scientists encountered unsolvable contradictions and paradoxes when probing the depths of the cosmos. These revelations served as a poignant reminder of the inherent limits of knowledge and the ever-present influence of subjectivity in our quest for understanding.

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