To Appreciate Quantum Physics, Read 'Mundaka Upanishad'—and Vice Versa

To read the Mundaka with a physicist’s eye—or to ponder quantum theory with an Upanishadic heart—is to sense that science and spirituality are complementary modes of wonder.

By Karan Bir Singh Sidhu – gold-medallist in Electronics & Communication Engineering; MA (Economics, University of Manchester); retired Indian Administrative Service officer (Punjab cadre) & former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab; self-taught student of quantum physics who chose Physics as an optional in the 1983 Civil Services Examination (AIR 2); and an independent writer and speaker on the meeting-ground of quantum physics and spirituality who scrupulously avoids pseudo-science.

To Appreciate Quantum Physics, Read Upanishads

1 · The Upanishads: India’s Earliest Thought-Experiments

Long before microscopes and cloud chambers, India produced the Upanishads—concise philosophical dialogues composed roughly between 800 and 200 BCE. Attributed to unnamed forest sages rather than single authors, these works (about 200 in all, with thirteen counted “principal”) form the reflective summit of the four Vedas. They ask the same grand question modern physics asks: What is the ultimate stuff of reality, and how do we know it?

2 · Introducing the Mundaka: A Razor for Ignorance

Among the principal texts, the Mundaka Upanishad—attached to the Atharvaveda—wears its purpose in its name: muṇḍa means “to shave.” In six succinct sections (three mundakas, each in two parts) it shears away illusions to reveal the indivisible ground of being. Its cadence is poetic, its images unforgettable, and its verdict uncompromising: reality is one, and that One is also the core of each conscious observer.

3 · Two Knowledges, One Goal

Early verses draw a bright line between apara vidyā, lower knowledge—the sciences, rituals, even the Vedas themselves—and para vidyā, higher knowing of the imperishable Brahman. The former is useful for orientation within the world; the latter is liberation from the world’s hypnotic spell. Rituals alone, warns the text, are “fragile boats” that cannot ferry a soul across the ocean of becoming.

4 · Brahman, Atman and the Shape of Creation

To picture the genesis of the cosmos, the Mundaka piles metaphor upon metaphor: sparks leaping from a central fire, a spider spinning and reabsorbing its web, rivers losing name and form in the sea. The lesson is not cosmography but ontology: every separate phenomenon is a transient modulation of a single, self-luminous field called Brahman, which is simultaneously the witness within—Atman.

5 · From Outer Rites to Inner Realisation

Because it shifts authority from temple ritual to interior awakening, the Mundaka became a manifesto for renunciants and a touchstone for Vedānta. Truthfulness, austerity, concentration, and the guidance of a realised teacher are prescribed as the sure path; intellectual brilliance, even scriptural, is merely prologue. In short, the text asks seekers to turn the lens of inquiry inward—exactly the move quantum physics would demand of its own practitioners centuries later.

6 · A Quantum World that Feels Familiar

When twentieth-century physics cracked the atom, the universe began to look oddly Upanishadic. Werner Heisenberg admitted that Vedānta discussions made quantum theory seem “less crazy.” Erwin Schrödinger found in the Upanishads a ready-made philosophical framework for his wave mechanics, praising their vision of one consciousness appearing as many forms—precisely what his equations implied about particles and waves.

7 · Observer and Observed: Consciousness in the Equation

The Mundaka insists that the knower and the known are not two. Quantum mechanics echoes this by showing that measurement is not a passive glance but an active participant in physical outcome. In both visions, reality crystallises only in relation to awareness, and the separations we habitually draw—subject versus object, energy versus matter—are conveniences, not absolutes.

8 · Space, Ether and the Vedic Ākāśa

Classical science once posited an all-pervading ether; Einstein discarded it, yet quantum theory resurrected a restless vacuum field humming with potential. The Vedic element ākāśa anticipates this outlook: an omnipresent, vibrating substratum from which matter and energy arise. Nikola Tesla, after conversations with Swami Vivekananda, began describing space in explicitly Sanskrit terms, seeking to tap the limitless power he believed permeates every point of the cosmos, without which the electro-magnetic waves could not traverse what was regarded as “vacuum”.

9 · Convergence: One Mystery, Two Languages

Physics arrives with equations, the Upanishad with mantras, yet both converge on a single astonishment: beneath multiplicity, an indivisible unity; within the observer, the same reality that dances as galaxies. To read the Mundaka with a physicist’s eye—or to ponder quantum theory with an Upanishadic heart—is to sense that science and spirituality are complementary modes of wonder, each urging us toward the same frontier where knowing becomes being.