TEACHING PHYSICS TO MONKS
In south-western India, inside 600-year-old Gaden monastery, visiting academics ILYA MANDEL and LESLIE ATKINS ELLIOTT sought to enlighten a group of young monks. The transfer of knowledge wasn’t all one way.
How do you enlighten students who seem to have the enlightenment thing covered? After lecturing and listening in a Buddhist monastery, LESLIE ATKINS ELLIOT and ILYA MANDEL started thinking about old ideas in new ways.
Leslie Atkins Elliott: My plan was to organise instruction around a series of questions – a thought experiment or a brief observation – hoping for discussion among the monks (that I may or may not be able to understand), and then a mini-lecture that says “So here is how Western science answers that question...”.
For example, when water disappears (in evaporation, or into plants), where does it go? Is it still water? Under what conditions can we say it is still water? It’s an idea that explores atoms, molecules, conservation, chemical changes, physical changes.
Some of these questions come from curricula I’ve taught; most are from conversations I’ve had over the years as a teacher. I loved these questions already: What exists? Under what conditions? Will it always? Why might we believe answers to these questions? – but as I read about Tibetan Buddhism, I thought they might be good in this setting, too.
In my classes, I often talk about conservation laws as “there are things I have but cannot give (a dream, the right of way); and there are things I give but cannot have (a kiss, a high five); and there are things I can give and have (money, food, bricks etc)”. And things like forces are more like high-fives; energy is more like bricks (it’s more like bricks than bricks!). But so much of this depends on language games. I don’t think the translation works.
Ilya Mandel: The monks are very clever and have a tremendous background in logic and debate, but they don’t have formal math skills. We quickly gave up on equations when we realised that mathematics was a challenge. The only place we really did any mathematics was in discussing distance scales, just to provide a sense of the size of the microscopic world and the cosmos, and the many realms of physics.
LAE: We started by thinking about the fact that atoms exist, which was a new idea for many but wasn’t earth shattering. But what I think surprised them the most was Ilya’s pendulum experiment.
IM: It was very improvised: a roll of duct tape on a string that I held in my hand. I tried to hang it off a switched-off ceiling fan, but the fan started swinging as well, so this turned into a rather complicated double pendulum…
LAE: You had us count how long it took to do 10 swings – and then halved the string and asked them to predict the period. And then you predicted it (accurately, of course). And they were impressed; like, audible gasps of amazement. If I had to teach it over again, I might start with the pendulum, and with that kind of predictive power. Not because the prediction is the “thing” I’m most interested in, but because it suggests that our models and ideas are in conversation with data. It orients people to a particular kind of game we’re playing and what it buys you. If I could characterise the biggest difference between teaching the monks and teaching undergraduates in America, it is that the monks didn’t feel compelled to agree with me. Every idea we offered was considered food for thought. So, for example, when I noted that warm air is simply air that has faster moving particles, one of the monks politely rejected this idea: “Madam, in Tibet when it is windy it is colder.” I have taught kinetic theory of gases dozens of times, and no one has ever mentioned this. Ditto for the forms of energy.
IM: I think the most important part of this particular rejoinder is the implicit acceptance of the paradigm of physics as an empirical science. The objection does not come from Buddhist/aristotelian reasoning from first principles, which was the initial approach of the monks, but from an apparent disagreement between theory and empirical observations. So, while it shows clever analysis on the part of this particular student, it also shows that we succeeded!
LAE: In our initial dive into forms of energy we had some typical ideas like “light energy” and “heat energy” but the monks added “compassion energy” to that list. And we told them that, to a physicist, there is no unique form of energy related to compassion. I will admit to feeling like a caricature of the overly rational scientist as we told them this.
IM: They seemed initially unimpressed, but in a later discussion one monk said to another something like, “You are thinking like a Buddhist, but we should be thinking about this as scientists” – so the general message of adopting a different viewing angle seemed to resonate.
LAE: It’s tempting to hear this story and decide that “compassion energy” is a uniquely Buddhist notion and represents a cultural barrier that makes it hard to teach physics – but I suspect that this idea is actually pretty common. My undergraduate students might not refer to compassion energy, but I would not be surprised if they maintain narratives of cause and effect that are inconsistent with physics, and closer to ideas that the monks hold in terms of, say, our thoughts as having a particular kind of physical agency.
IM: Though our Buddhist students’ point that compassion energy and thought energy were more important than mere physical forms of energy may have been more uniquely Buddhist…
LAE: It’s like you never lived in California! I maintain that even this point is not uniquely Buddhist (c.f., Star Wars).
There is a style of Buddhist debate the monks engage in (usually in pairs), with a “defender” and “challenger”. The challenger, standing, poses a series of questions that the defender, sitting, can agree or disagree with. This took place in the courtyard our first night there (it does not happen every night but is common) and we got to watch. It all takes place in
Q: You have a cup of water and pour half of it out. Then you pour out half of what’s left. And again. Can you keep doing this forever? Is there a smallest piece of water?
Tibetan, of course – our translator noted that one pair was debating why they wear the red robes; others were debating implications of the science they are learning (“since my hand is made of atoms, my hand does not exist” was the translation). It’s incredibly animated and they look like they’re having a blast.
We asked our translators to help us choose a good debate topic (not everything is debate-worthy) and chose to ask the monks to endorse or refute the claim that everyone ate some of Newton’s apple at lunch one day. In the ensuing – and quite intense – debate, the refuters’ main claim was “the past is not on your plate”. (A physics interpretation of this idea might be construed as “all carbon-12 atoms are the same and indistinguishable” or “carbon has no memory”.) I don’t think of this as a particularly empirical claim on their part. (The dissenting monks accused this monk of arguing from Buddhist philosophy and not scientific philosophy.)
IM: Buddhist monks were convinced that objects naturally come to rest when no forces are acting on them (and I am not sure we convinced all of them otherwise). The monks would have fit perfectly into Aristotle’s Lyceum – or, rather, Aristotle would have felt very much at home in the monastery!
LAE: There’s a commitment in Buddhism to the idea of impermanence. There’s a commitment in physics to conservation laws – which, of course, is a commitment to the idea of permanence. It’s interesting to think about trying to learn physics while holding that lens.
IM: I learned a lot about teaching physics from Leslie. My natural reaction would have been to opt for oldschool lecturing, especially when faced with the relative lack of preparation in the audience. Surely this is the time to teach from the pulpit, rather than waste time on letting the audience express their ignorance. And yet spending an hour asking them for what they thought of as possible forms of energy [shown on the whiteboard opposite] was clearly a useful strategy in discussing the domain of physics. I tried to incorporate this when asking for predictions for the pendulum. Less algebra, more of a sense of what empirical science is about.
LAE: As a teacher I’ve aimed to develop courses in which students start to ask really great questions. They don’t just take what you say and spit it back to you, but really make sense of it and question it. With undergraduates, this is a heavy lift. With the monks, it was trivial. They questioned things in deep, physical ways. It makes me wonder if there’s an aspect of their training that supports this stance towards science or if it actually says something damning about our educational system that stops students from asking these questions. I feel like we could learn something about learning from the monks.
THE EMORY-TIBET SCIENCE initiative was conceived in 2006 through a partnership between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Emory University, in Atlanta, US. Designed to introduce modern science for use in Buddhist monasteries in India, the curriculum has been presented as a series of courses in the philosophy of science, neuroscience, biology and physics to more than 1500 monks at three monasteries.
Mandel and Elliott taught 25 monks, most in their mid-20s, a two-week broad-survey course covering topics ranging from Newton’s laws to energy to astronomy, introducing key themes that will be taught in greater depth in subsequent courses.
Q: Light from the sun reaches the Earth - then what happens? Does the light cease to exist? Does it turn into something else?