Rabindranath and Science: Seeking ‘Oneness of Truth’

Rabindranath Tagore, known as the ‘Bard of Bengal’, was born on 25 Baishakh, 1268 (7 May 1861), at Jorasanko Thakur Bari, Kolkata, India. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. On his 165th birth anniversary, I revisit some thoughts about his intuitive knowledge in science.
The Swedish Nobel Committee mentioned that the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. I wonder – how did his poetic thoughts express modern science in his time and beyond?
Though Rabindranath is mainly known for his creation in art, literature and music, he had deep curiosity and regard for science. His initiation to astronomy by his father, Debendranath Tagore, and later on his interest in life science enabled him to pursue his search for the origin of the universe. His interest in science can be traced to his early teens. He loved astronomy, and when in England, he visited the Greenwich Observatory. Eminent astrophysicist Meghnad Saha persuaded him to write a book – ‘Vishva-Parichay’ (Introducing the Universe) – in 1937, which he dedicated to Satyaendranath Bose, the discoverer of the Boson and Bose-Einstein statistics. He collaborated with one of his very close family friends, Prashanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who became General Secretary of Vishva Bharati University in 1921. He had encounters with European scientists and philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. Somerfield and Werner Heisenberg met him in Calcutta at his Jorasanko house in 1928.

Heisenberg is reported to have said in 1972 that Rabindranath’s philosophical ideas had been of help to him as a physicist. Heisenberg had several conversations with the mature poet (then 67) about relativity, incommensurability, interconnectedness and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality. After the conversations Heisenberg said, “Some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much sense. That was of great help for me.” Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, remarked in 1984 that “Curiously enough, the present evolution of science is running in the direction stated by the great Indian poet.”
Rabindranath’s deep-rooted belief in integrating human consciousness with nature manifested through his perception of the environment in many ways during his days in Santiniketan. His close association with famous physicist and biologist Jagadish Chandra Bose and later on his various meetings with physicist Albert Einstein took him to different levels of understanding science. About the nature of the universe, Einstein thought about the two different ideas of reality: one is ‘the world as a unity dependent on humanity’, and another is ‘the world as a reality independent of the human factor’. On the other hand, Rabindranath thought, ‘When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth; we feel it as beauty.’
His disagreement with Einstein on the question of the existence of reality independent of human beings was rooted in Oriental philosophical tradition. It also echoed the basic understanding of quantum mechanics. When Rabindranath was born in 1861, quantum mechanics was in a very early stage. At that time the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of black body radiation was discovered, which is a key step on the road to what became the first version of quantum physics, that we have from Max Planck in 1900. However, in 1864, Maxwell made a comment that “scientific truth should be presented in different forms and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and vivid colouring of a physical illustration or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolic representation.” This proposal paved the way physics developed in the 1920s. We see there were two ways to describe the quantum world. One approach, pioneered by Heisenberg, is dependent on abstract mathematical symbolism; the other, Schrodinger’s imagery of waves. But both were equally valid. This is the time when Rabindranath grew up, developed his worldview and received the Nobel Prize in literature.
Rabindranath has seen the first quantum revolution developed by physicists such as Planck, Born, De Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac. The second quantum evolution started in the 1960s, when scientists came upon some concepts beyond wave-particle duality. John Bell, a theoretical physicist, in 1964, through mathematical reasoning, developed ‘Bell’s inequality’, which is a framework proving that no physical theory based on local hidden variables can reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. This leads to the various facets of the second quantum revolution, such as the development of quantum objects, quantum information, and quantum cryptography. Alain Aspect, a physics Nobel laureate in 2022, raised a question: ‘Will we be able to entangle a large number of quantum bits?’
Rabindranath did not observe the development of the second quantum revolution; however, using his intuitive knowledge and poetic thought, he imagined the entangled world a long time before the quantum entanglement was discovered. Rabindranath mentioned that “we are of the faith that Truth is one and undivided…Knowledge flows in two streams: from the east and from the west. In their unity is perceived the ‘Oneness of Truth’ that pervades and sustains the entire universe.”
 In a letter to Amiya Chakravarty in 1925, Rabindranath welcomed the modern technology but observed that in the age of steam we see more ‘clever’ things but not ‘perfect’ things. In the age of artificial intelligence, we also see lots of clever things solving problems very promptly, but we also see various mistakes induced by human-created algorithms. This is the reason, probably, in his essay ‘Shiksha’ (1906), Rabindranath wrote: ‘In order to teach science to youngsters, their eyes need to be opened up first and the power of observation enriched.’
 In short, Rabindranath, in his conversation with Einstein, refers to science as ‘the impersonal human world of truths’. He also reminds us that in this world man is not the only factor to consider: there are other factors too, such as natural laws. I argue that this leads us to perceive the truth in a more unified way, and in the age of artificial intelligence and the second quantum revolution, we are heading towards Tagore’s ‘oneness of truth’.
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The writer is a UK based academic who writes on science, philosophy and education