In “The Buddha Imagines The Unimaginable (And Gets It Right!),” a new piece for NPR.org, Robert Krulwich talks to his friend Ezra Block about one of the Buddha’s lesser-known special abilities, which Block learned about by reading The Universal History of Numbers, by Georges Ifrah.
The special ability in question? It turns out, as Block says, that the historical, actual Buddha once calculated the size of an atom. And he, for all intents and purposes, nailed it. You’ll find Krulwich’s piece here.
Interesting, yet the article page was filled with html
it seems that page has gone awry on the NPR site. we've replaced the link with a new one going to the main page of Krulwich's blog.
Related, sorta / kinda.
Years ago (Someone out there recall the August '85 issue of Scientific American?) things "fractal" were all very new. (I got in on the ground floor, having studied non-linearity before it was a term.) The community was small, so soon after cobbling together a Mandelbrot microscope (using the C=64's BIOS routines, surprisingly effective) I connected with the fellow who was running the Hubbard supercomputer at Ithaca. (Dear Homer … miss you tons.) He very kindly sent me a set of very, very, very high-res slides. Glorious.
Fast forward slightly.
During a conversation / audience, I pulled out the slides and showed them to the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. (I had been talking with him about Professor Guenther's "From Reductionism to Creativity; rDzogchen and the New Science of Mind".) He peeked at them and huh huh responded with something like, "Yes, yes, it's like that *giggle*"
E.Ma!
ben
p.s. you've tuned into "self-directed neuro-plasticity"? Alaya-vijnana, n'est-ce pas?
🙂