Is Physics Beginning to Look Like Advaita Vedanta?
- Dr Sp Mishra
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
What Stephen Hawking, multiple realities and an ancient Indian philosophy made me wonder about the nature of reality.
I recently started reading Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design. I expected physics. What I didn't expect was philosophy.
After the first two chapters, I found myself thinking about a question much bigger than physics: What is reality? And, perhaps more interestingly, is the reality we experience the same as ultimate reality?
I am still learning about Advaita Vedanta, so I'm not claiming to have found an answer. But something in Hawking reminded me of a central idea I've encountered in Advaita, that what appears to us as reality may not be the complete or ultimate picture of it. That connection was enough to make me want to explore it further.
The observer changes the question
We tend to assume reality is simply "out there." A tree is a tree. Time is time. Space is space. An event happens, and everyone should agree on what happened.
Modern physics has made that intuition uncomfortable. Einstein's relativity showed that measurements of space and time depend on the observer's frame of reference. Quantum mechanics went further still, challenging our classical assumptions about what "physical reality" even means.
Hawking calls this model-dependent realism, the idea that our descriptions of reality depend on the models we use to understand and predict what we observe. This doesn't mean reality is imaginary. It means our description of reality may not be reality itself.
That distinction stayed with me.
What if what we experience is only an appearance?
This is where my thoughts turned to Advaita Vedanta.
Advaita is built around non-duality, literally, "not two." At its heart is the idea that ultimate reality, Brahman, is not fundamentally separate from the individual self, Atman.
Our ordinary experience says otherwise. I am here, you are there; this is my body, that is another's; this is my success, that is yours. Advaita questions whether this apparent separateness represents the deepest level of reality.
The concept of Maya is central here. It's often translated as "illusion," but that can mislead. A better starting point: Maya is the way reality appears to us through the limits of our perception and understanding. The world we experience isn't dismissed as unreal, Advaita simply asks whether what we experience is the ultimate reality.
And suddenly I found myself thinking about Hawking again.
Are these really the same idea?
Probably not, and here we need to be careful. Physics and Advaita Vedanta aren't doing the same thing. Physics works through observation, mathematics, experiment and testable prediction. Advaita is a philosophical and spiritual tradition concerned with consciousness, self and ultimate reality.
So it would be wrong to say "quantum physics proves Advaita Vedanta." It doesn't. Nor does model-dependent realism establish the truth of Advaita.
But we can still ask whether there's an interesting resonance between them. Both challenge the comfortable assumption that everyday experience gives us a complete picture of reality. That, by itself, is a fascinating place to begin.
The wave and the ocean
There's an old metaphor that helps me hold the Advaita idea of oneness.
Imagine a wave in the ocean. We can point to it and say: this is a wave. It has a shape, a location. It rises and falls. It appears to be an individual thing. But the wave has no existence apart from the ocean, it is not separate from the water that constitutes it. At one level, we can meaningfully talk about the wave as an individual phenomenon. At another, it is simply the ocean taking a particular form.
Could our individual existence be something like that? We experience ourselves as separate. But what if the separation isn't fundamental? That's one of the ideas in Advaita I find genuinely beautiful and it raises an extraordinary question: if everything is ultimately one, why do we experience ourselves as separate?
What about free will?
This connects to something else the book got me thinking about.
We experience ourselves as independent decision-makers. I decide, you decide, governments decide, companies decide. And yet every human decision unfolds inside a physical universe governed by natural laws. Our brains hold billions of neurons; our bodies, trillions of cells; chemical and electrical processes run continuously beneath our awareness. We don't decide when our cells divide, when our hearts beat, when we age and we still don't fully understand how consciousness emerges from the brain's physical processes at all.
And yet we feel something very strongly: I am choosing.
So what is free will? An independent force inside us or a feeling produced by the brain? And if every person is choosing within the same physical universe, perhaps part of the messiness of human civilisation becomes clearer: billions of apparently separate centres of choice, constantly colliding, my interests against yours, my freedom against another's.
Advaita offers a radically different angle: what if the apparent separation itself is part of the problem?
The mystery of the universe
In 1929, Edwin Hubble's observations gave us compelling evidence that the universe is expanding. Almost a century later, we're still working out what that really means.
We've found galaxies billions of light-years away, detected gravitational waves, discovered exoplanets, built theories of extraordinary precision. And yet we still don't know what dark matter actually is, or what dark energy ultimately represents. We have no complete theory unifying gravity with quantum mechanics. We don't know why the universe has the laws and constants it does or, most fundamentally, why there is something rather than nothing.
Every generation pushes the boundary of knowledge a little further. And every time we do, the boundary of mystery seems to move further away too. That's strangely humbling.
Perhaps the real lesson is intellectual humility
Maybe this is where physics and philosophy meet not in their answers, but in their capacity to make us question our assumptions. Physics tells us the universe is stranger than everyday experience suggests. Philosophy asks us to examine the assumptions behind that experience. Advaita asks us to question the very distinction between the observer and what is observed.
None of these, by itself, gives us a final answer. Perhaps that's precisely the point.
I'm not writing this because I believe modern physics proves an ancient Indian philosophy. I haven't discovered that, and I don't think anyone has.
I'm writing it because the questions seem worth asking:
Could there be different valid descriptions of the same reality?
Is the reality we experience fundamentally different from ultimate reality?
Why do we experience ourselves as separate?
What is consciousness, a product of matter, or something deeper?
And if the universe runs on laws we don't fully understand, what does that mean for free will?
I don't know. But that seems like a good place for a student to begin, not with a conclusion, but with a question.
And perhaps the most interesting education starts when we become comfortable saying: I don't know. Let me find out.
About the Author:
Dr SP Mishra is the Founder of India Career Centre, a Hyderabad-based career guidance, study-abroad consulting and educational research organisation. He writes and speaks on career decision-making, higher education, skills, employability and the future of work in India. Also hosts the India Career Centre Podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.
References:
The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Satishchandra Chatterjee, Dhirendramohan Datta
You may watch the following short video as well.
Comments