Showing posts with label Science and Spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science and Spirituality. Show all posts
Monday, February 4, 2019
Take a 60-minute tour of space, time and spacetime
“I’ll begin with Saint Augustine,” says Emory physicist Erin Bonning, referring to the 4th-century philosopher and theologian who wrote some of the earliest known reflections on time and how humans perceive it. He summed time up: “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is, and try to explain, I am baffled.”
Bonning, director of the Emory Planetarium and a lecturer in the Department of Physics, collapses centuries of ideas and discovery about the universe into a mind-bending, 60-minute talk, “Space, Time and Spacetime,” that you can watch in the video above.
Bonning explains the ongoing quest for our understanding of time and how it relates to space: From recognition of the regular appearances of the sun, to the sense of time flowing through an hour glass, to the ticking of the first mechanical clocks, and on through the insights of Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Michelson, Einstein and more. She even gives the perspective of aliens whizzing by Earth in a spaceship.
She winds up her talk, a recently delivered Emory Williams Lecture in the Liberal Arts, by discussing explorations of gravitational waves, dark matter and the drive to manipulate spacetime deliberately.
Related:
Fantastic light: From science fiction to fact
Thursday, February 22, 2018
'The Enlightened Gene' bridges Buddhism and biology
By April Hunt, Emory Report
For nearly a decade, the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative has done more than challenge the idea that religion and science don’t mix by developing and successfully launching a comprehensive science curriculum for thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns.
The first major change to Tibetan Buddhist monastic education in six centuries also demonstrated how insights and information from both the monastics and professors could enrich each other’s understanding of biology, physics and other sciences.
Arri Eisen, an Emory College professor of pedagogy in biology and the Institute for Liberal Arts, explores those connections in “The Enlightened Gene,” a book he co-wrote with one of the monks, Geshe Yungdrung Konchok.
“He grew up on the Tibetan plateau herding yaks. I grew up one of about five Jewish guys in North Carolina in the 1970s,” Eisen says. “We had different experiences, but we could use them to develop a common approach, to try to better understand our world.”
Emory has woven Western and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual traditions together since founding the Emory-Tibet Partnership in 1998. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory since 2007.
Read more in Emory Report.
Related:
Emory Tibet Science Initiative rolls out bridges to inner and outer worlds
Friday, February 16, 2018
'Divine Felines' showcases Egypt's exaltation of cats
By Leslie King
Emory Report
“In ancient Egypt, cats and dogs were gods, and they have not forgotten this!” says Melinda Hartwig, curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.
That exalted stature is illuminated in the exhibition “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” which opened Feb. 10 at the museum and will be on view through Nov. 11.
The exhibit showcases cats and lions, plus dogs and jackals, as domesticated pets, creatures of the wild or mythic symbols of divinities, in ancient Egyptian mythology, kingship and everyday life. Animal burial practices and luxury items decorated with feline and canine features are also on display.
“Cats and dogs reveal so much about ancient Egyptian culture,” says Hartwig. “These animals were just as important to the ancient Egyptians as they are to us today.”
The kings of Egypt were associated with the lion, thus, the human head on the lion’s body or the sphinx.
“Cats were first domesticated in Egypt around 4000 BC. They were lovable pets, hunters of vermin and divine embodiments of fertility and protection. Lions and jungle cats were admired for their power, and were linked with royalty and divinity,” Hartwig continues. “Dogs were also kept as pets. Their loyalty and hunting abilities were keenly valued. Often found roaming the ancient necropolises, dogs and jackals became embodiments of the gods who protected the dead.”
Read more in Emory Report.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Solar eclipse adds cosmic spin to Emory orientation
By Carol Clark
The Emory University class of 2021 already has a unique distinction: The campus orientation day for the first-year students will occur beneath a nearly total solar eclipse. From about 2:38 to 2:41 pm on Monday, August 21, the moon will cover 97.7 percent of the sun over Atlanta.
A couple of solar telescopes will be set up on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Building between 1 and 4 pm for staff, faculty, students and their family members who want to observe the sun through them — weather permitting. But a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses, a simple pinhole camera — or even the leaves of a tree — will also make it possible to safely view the eclipse anywhere on campus where the sun is visible.
Emory first-year students plan to gather on the Quad between 2:15 and 3 pm for eclipse watching. At the Oxford campus, first-year students will gather in front of the Oxford Science Building starting at 2 pm where there will be music, a solar telescope and sun-themed snacks and drinks. The Emory Police Department will also host group eclipse viewing on the field of the Student Activity and Academic Center at the Clairmont Campus. All students, faculty and staff are welcome to attend these events.
Atlanta Science Tavern has also compiled this list of solar eclipse events in and around Atlanta.
A total solar eclipse will sweep across a 70-mile-wide area of the United States, starting on the Pacific coast of Oregon and continuing all the way to South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean. Even though Atlanta lies just beyond the path of totality, if the weather is clear the near-total eclipse will be worth pausing from work or school to go outside and experience.
To begin with, it’s rare. The last time the sun over Atlanta was nearly obscured by the moon was on May 31, 1984, when it was 99.7 percent covered. The New York Times described what happened as the skies began to darken about 20 minutes after noon: “The temperature dropped six degrees, flowers closed their petals, dogs howled, pigeons tucked their heads under their wings as if to sleep and the whole city was bathed in a kind of diffused light, not unlike that accompanying the approach of a severe storm.”
Sidney Perkowitz, Emory emeritus professor of physics, was on campus that day in 1984. He stood outside near the old physics building, now Callaway Hall, beneath a large white oak on the Quad.
“I remember a lot of people came out on the Quad, particularly around this tree,” he says. “It was a joint social experience.”
The darkening effect as the moon began to cover the sun was “eerie,” he says. “It didn’t feel exactly like twilight, it felt like something weirder was going on. It just seemed abnormal.”
Perkowitz watched the light as it passed through the leaves of the tree. “As the ambient light gets reduced, you begin to see multiple images of the crescent sun on the ground below,” Perkowitz says, explaining that each tiny space between the leaves acted as a pinhole-like opening, similar to a camera. “It’s spectacular because you see dozens and dozens of the images, filtered through the leaves.”
Aristotle observed this same phenomenon beneath a tree during a solar eclipse in the fourth century BC. The Greeks were debating at the time whether light moves in straight lines. The projection of the image of the sun through the leaves was evidence that it does, although the principles behind it would remained unresolved for nearly 2,000 years.
The white oak that Perkowitz stood beneath 33 years ago was struck by lightning in 2016 and is no longer there. There are plenty of other trees on campus, however, where eclipse watchers can stand to experience the event.
Or you can make your own pinhole projector by poking a hole in a piece of cardboard. NASA provides directions and some templates. During the eclipse, you stand with your back to the sun and hold up the cardboard so that light passes through it and hits a wall, the ground or a piece of paper that you hold up to capture a projection of the image of the sun.
Sunglasses do not provide enough protection to look directly at the sun at any time during a partial eclipse. You need special solar viewing glasses, which are available free at Fulton County libraries or can be purchased online. Beware of fakes — the American Astronomical Society provides guidance to help ensure that solar glasses are certified and safe to wear.
Horace Dale, director of the Emory Observatory, will have a limited number of solar-viewing glasses available and will set up two solar telescopes between 1 and 4 pm on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Center — if the weather holds. Take the elevator to the fifth floor of the building and follow the signs to get to the rooftop.
“If it’s just partly cloudy, we should be able to see through the breaks in the clouds,” Dale says. But even the threat of a storm, he adds, will mean having to pack up the expensive equipment to avoid it getting damaged by rain.
The special filters on the solar telescopes will make it possible to directly view the sun safely. “You’ll be able to see the filamentary structure of the sun and any flare activity on the edge of the sun,” Dale says. “There might even be a few planets that pop out.”
An Atlanta native, Dale experienced a partial eclipse here in 1970 when he was six. “I remember my dad telling me not to look at the sun,” he says. “It was a really interesting experience for me.”
Which is why Dale has already explained to the teachers of his son Joey, six, and his daughter Emma, five, that his children will not attend school on August 21. Instead they will be getting an eclipse lesson from their father. Their mother, Jessica, will also be present. A dental hygienist, she has the day off since the dentist is heading for the path of totality and will close the office.
Astronomer Erin Bonning, director of the Emory Planetarium, will be in Clayton, Georgia — in the path of totality — during the eclipse. She will be giving a presentation for Goizueta Business School’s orientation of incoming Emory juniors at a retreat center in north Georgia. The BBA class of 2019 not only holds the distinction of being Goizueta Business School’s 100th-anniversary class — it enjoys the bonus of entering orientation with great timing in a great location.
“This will be my first total solar eclipse and I’m excited,” Bonning says. She quickly adds: “I’m cautiously excited because all astronomers know that when something really big is about to happen you don’t want the clouds to hear you talking about it. Clouds are the great enemies of astronomers.”
When Bonning was in fifth grade, in Maryland, she had fervently anticipated a near total-eclipse event. When the big moment finally arrived, it was cloudy and rainy.
She did get to witness a lunar eclipse in Atlanta around 5 am on October 8, 2014. “I got up early and walked around downtown to find a good view,” she says. “It’s breathtaking to see the Earth cast a shadow in space and the moon pass through it. It’s one thing to write down an equation for curving space time, but when you see a visual illustration of these facts it’s so much more moving. It made me feel connected to the universe.”
A woman standing near her during the lunar eclipse had a different reaction. “She said, ‘Huh. I thought it would be more impressive than that,’” Bonning recalls. “I took a deep breath and held my tongue.”
The August 21 solar eclipse is particularly special since the path of totality will stretch from sea to shining sea, across the United States. “It’s unusual because it’s taking place over such a large inhabited stretch of land,” Bonning says. “The last time we had such a grand solar eclipse across America was a century ago.”
Following are Bonning’s tips for observing the solar eclipse, whether you stay in Atlanta or travel to totality.
Plan your activity. “Don’t just hop in the car on August 21 and spontaneously head for the path of totality, or you’re going to see a partial eclipse in a traffic jam,” Bonning says. You can read more about traffic predictions here.
Don’t worry about height. “You don’t need to go to the top of a mountain or the top of a building,” Bonning says. “If you can see the sun, you can see the eclipse. It’s not like getting closer to it will give you a better view.”
Manage your expectations. “While it will be extremely cool to see the eclipse, it’s not going to look like a dragon came out of the sky and devoured the sun. That’s a myth,” Bonning says. “An eclipse is a chance to stop and perceive and reflect. It proceeds slowly and deliberately, which is not exactly the pace of modern society.”
Be in the moment. If you’re not an expert at photographing eclipses, forget trying to get the perfect selfie for social media. “You’ll be better off being open to the experience,” Bonning says. “Observe shifts in the light. Feel the temperature drop. You may notice animals behaving differently.”
Make it a fun, educational experience for kids. While you need to emphasize to young children the importance of not staring directly at the sun with the naked eye during the eclipse, you can do so in a fun way that helps them understand why. Bonning recommends parents visit this Planetary Society site, which includes directions for how to make pinhole projectors, including ones in fancy, pinhole-punched shapes.
“We’re very lucky on Earth,” Perkowitz says. “We have the largest moon of all the planets and it has all kinds of connections to love and romance and poetry. And on top of that, it has this amazing alignment with the sun that provides this incredible sight every so often.”
The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away and much smaller than Earth, he notes, while the sun is 93 million miles distant and is huge — far bigger than all of the planets in the solar system put together.
“It’s a strange coincidence that the moon at its distance and size almost perfectly covers the sun at its distance and size,” Perkowitz says. “It makes you stop and wonder — is it just a coincidence? Some people call an eclipse a religious experience. I call it cosmic.”
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
For Emory students, 'a lifestyle approach to health'
By April Hunt
Emory Report
If you’re going to change the way that college students talk about health, the first step is for students to do the talking.
It didn’t take long for Michelle Lampl to realize that. As director of Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health, Lampl saw the success in a pilot “health partner” initiative conducted at the Center for Health Discovery and Well-Being, and turned it into the Human Health 1,2,3 Program for Emory College undergraduates.
The peer-taught program draws on the principles of predictive health and opens avenues for students to have stewardship of their own health. And, because Health 100 is required for every first-year Emory College student, the success of that foundational course has helped bolster student understanding of health.
“Emory is a leader in the paradigm shift in the science of health,” Lampl says. “Medicine is defined by disease. We focus on health. Our program is about changing the culture.”
Launched in 2012, human health is an interdisciplinary degree that has exploded in demand, from four majors its first year to 250 now. It has also attracted the notice of peer schools and beyond for its innovative approach that connects the liberal arts focus of Emory College with the groundbreaking research in public and global health sciences happening across the university.
Health 1,2,3 offers undergraduates the sort of education often reserved for graduate students: a framework to understand not only the science needed in health-related careers, but also the physical, mental and spiritual components of health.
Here’s how it works: All first-year students must take Health 100, which includes the study of timely health topics, such as getting enough sleep, and training for each student to set specific goals.
Students who find Health 100 informative can enroll in Health 200, where they get training on the science of health and how to lead peers in discussions. Health 300 is the course where trained students become peer health partners for Health 100, overseeing the course with faculty supervision.
“The way I describe it is, this is a lifestyle approach to health,” says Dylan Hurley, a first-year student who enrolled in Health 200 this spring.
“This is an integration of science and discussion, to make the concepts come to life,” Hurley adds. “That’s what makes it so essential.”
Read the whole article in Emory Report.
Related:
Human health major aims at culture change
New health course shifts to peer-led, personalized approach
Monday, February 6, 2017
Astronaut Mark Kelly to launch Atlanta Science Festival at Emory
By Carol Clark
The 2017 Atlanta Science Festival blasts off on Tuesday, March 14 with a talk by Captain Mark Kelly – commander of Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final mission – at 7 pm in Emory’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium.
“We wanted to start off this year with someone who appeals to people of all ages and who epitomizes science in action,” says Meisa Salaita, co-executive director of the Atlanta Science Festival, which will continue through March 25 with events throughout the metro area. “Who better than an astronaut to show us how science can take us to new and exciting places?”
The title of Kelly’s talk is “Endeavour to Succeed.” Tickets for the event can be bought in advance on the Atlanta Science Festival’s web site for $12 ($8 for children 12 and under). They will also be available at the door the day of the event for $15.
Starting at 5:30 pm, during the countdown to Kelly’s talk, the public is invited to join toy rocket launching activities on the Glenn Memorial lawn, led by members of the Georgia Tech Ramblin’ Rocket Club and the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers.
Kelly, who began his NASA career in 1996, commanded the Space Shuttle Discovery, as well as the Endeavour. He left the astronaut corps in the summer of 2011 to help his wife, former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recover from gunshot wounds she received in an assassination attempt on her life. The couple’s story captivated the nation, and they went on to found Americans for Responsible Solutions to advocate for gun control.
NASA is comparing biological data from the Earth-bound Kelly with his identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, who recently spent a year in space. The unique Twins Study may offer insights into how to prepare astronauts for a long-term mission to Mars.
Kelly is also a prolific author, including numerous children’s books with space themes, and he will be available for a book signing following his talk at Emory.
The 12-day Atlanta Science Festival features talks, lab tours, film screenings, participatory activities and science demonstrations — more than 100 events at dozens of different venues, including the Emory campus. “We’ve expanded the number of days at the festival of the year, to avoid scheduling conflicts and give people a chance to experience more of the festival,” Salaita says. (Click here for the full schedule of events.)
Physics Live (at the Emory Mathematics and Science Center) and a Chemistry Carnival (at the Atwood Chemistry Center) will be among the Emory campus highlights, featuring lab tours and science demonstrations from 3:30 to 7 pm on Friday, March 24. (Click here for a full listing of Emory-related events.)
New at the festival this year will be an appearance by New York rap artist Baba Brinkman. He will perform “Rap Guide to Climate Chaos” at 1:30 on Saturday, March 18 at the Drew Charter School.
Also new this year is “The Art and Science of Cooking with Insects,” featuring free tastings, at 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 23 at Manuels Tavern.
About 20,000 visitors are expected for the festival’s culminating event, the Exploration Expo, from 11 am to 4 pm on Saturday, March 25 at Centennial Olympic Park. Around 100 interactive exhibits will delight curious minds of all ages, from Emory chemist’s Doug Mulford’s “Ping Pong Big Bang” to the immersive Google Village experience.
Leading sponsors of this year’s Atlanta Science Festival include Emory, Georgia Tech, the Metro Atlanta Chamber, Delta Airlines and Google.
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Bridging ancient Tibetan medicine and modern Western science
By Carol Clark
Tawni Tidwell is the first Westerner to be certified in Tibetan medicine by Tibetan teachers in the Tibetan language. The PhD candidate in Emory’s Department of Anthropology is now working on a dissertation about how Tibetan physicians diagnose diseases, especially cancer.
“I see myself as a bridge between Tibetan medicine and Western science,” says Tidwell, who became a Tibetan physician in 2015. “I feel like each has something to offer the other.”
Tidwell was born in Colorado but lived from the ages of two to five in South Korea, where her father was a U.S. Army surgeon. Tidwell and her mother lived in mainstream Seoul, which gave her an affinity for Asia when she returned to Colorado. She was also influenced by the Native American ancestry on both sides of her family and by the ecology of Colorado, where she became involved in rock climbing and winter mountaineering.
Tidwell has trained as an animal tracker, worked as a ranger at a biological preserve, taught wilderness survival lessons, and led gap-year students on trips to learn about traditional cultures through the “Where There Be Dragons” program.
Tidwell studied at the premier Tibetan medical school outside of Tibet, in northern India (the cultural and intellectual capital of the displaced Tibetan community). In order to enroll, she had to pass a five-day exam of memorized Tibetan grammar and Buddhist logic, as well as general Tibetan cultural knowledge. From there on, each year she had to recite from memory 115 pages of a medical textbook in Tibetan, considered one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to master. She also had to complete written exams, coursework and attend classes, all in the Tibetan language among Tibetan peers.
Below is an interview with Tidwell, covering some of the milestones of her long and winding road to becoming a certified Tibetan medical practitioner.
Where did you spend your undergraduate years?
I went to Stanford, where I started out majoring in physics and pre-med, with the idea of a career focused on aerospace medicine, exploring questions like how the body adapts to space.
In physics, you take the extremes of a problem to understand how an average system operates. I thought if you studied how humans respond to extremes, then maybe you could find out more about how the human body works and responds to illness.
I was also really interested in the relationship between our bodies and the land. I eventually switched my major to Earth Systems. Stanford has a 2,000-acre biological preserve – ranging from redwoods to chaparral and perennial grasslands – where I worked as a docent and a ranger. I learned to identify dozens of different species of grass. I wanted to know why this grass species survives in the desert and another one doesn’t, and why the bobcat patrols this area and not another.
When did you become interested in Tibetan culture?
I took a gap year after my freshman year and went to the Emory Tibetan Studies Program in north India, led by Tara Doyle (senior lecturer in Emory’s Department of Religion). I studied Buddhist philosophy and the Tibetan language, which is exquisite and poetic. The word for computer translates as “brain of light.”
The Tibetan language pays special attention to the sacred. It reminds you of the pursuit of understanding the reality we all experience and how one should live. It’s very specific about cognition and the mind and provides a much more detailed description of the trajectory of perception.
I feel different when I speak in Tibetan. People have told me that my whole body language changes.
Why did you enroll in an animal-tracking course?
I went to Washington, D.C., to work with an environmental organization. I realized that most of the environmental specialists in our nation’s capital had no time to spend in the natural world. They are completely disconnected from it. I wondered, what were humans like as foragers and what have we lost by being academic specialists without first-hand experience?
I went to New Jersey for a 10-day course taught by Tom Brown, Jr., an animal tracker and wilderness guru. He basically teaches what it takes to survive when you are butt naked in the woods and have nothing. In just the first class, you learn about wild edibles, how to make fire by friction, how to make two different traps and two different snares, and how to tan a hide. Other classes build on those basics.
What was your favorite part of your survivalist training?
Fire. There is something so enigmatic about making fire by friction. The experience ignites something deep in our past. It’s almost like creating life. You have to get a feel for the spindle and the fireboard. You apply just the right speed and pressure and when the fire comes out it’s like magic. And you realize that you can have a relationship to everything like that in the natural world.
After I finished the initial course, I realized it was really about putting in the experiential “dirt time’ to learn the skills. I took more courses and helped with teaching. I lived in the New Jersey pine barrens for about a year in a pit shelter, which was dug about four feet into the ground and was about 10 feet in diameter. It was full-on immersion in ecology.
I saw how some people’s lives changed as their wilderness survival skills accumulated. It gives you a certain freedom. People realize they don’t necessarily have to live in the way that they thought they had to live.
Do you ever get scared being alone in the wilderness?
Scary movies make me scared, but not being alone in the forest. I imagine, though, that I would be scared in grizzly bear or polar bear territory, since they hunt humans.
Wolves don’t scare me because I read everything I could about the Arctic wolf when I was in elementary school – I was that kind of kid – and I knew they weren’t a threat to humans.
It’s actually part of Buddhist philosophy: The more you learn about the world, the more you learn about what you should, and should not, fear.
How did you wind up in Tibetan medical school?
In 2008, Tara Doyle asked me to return as assistant director of the Emory Tibetan Studies Program in north India.
While working in South America, I had met a curandero in Bolivia who told me that his grandmother had known more than 5,000 healing plants, he knew 2,000 and his daughter would know a few hundred or even fewer. I realized that Tibetan medicine is really unique in that it is this ancient medicinal system connected to the land – using medicines made from plants and minerals gathered from the Tibetan plateau, the highest place in the world – and it is also written down.
I thought that if I had a chance to study Tibetan medicine I could really do something with it. Dr. Khenrab Gyamtso, the vice principal of the Men-Tsee-Khang medical institute in north India, agreed to tutor me for a few hours at the end of every day, after he and I had already put in a full day of work. He eventually encouraged me to apply for enrollment.
What did your studies involve?
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| Medicinal herb from the Tibetan plateau |
The first few years were mainly memorization of parts of the medical canon, more than 100 pages a year. And then at the end of every year you recite them. At first I didn’t value memorization but I eventually realized that it’s an amazing technology. It feels like a profound meditation. It’s clever in the sense that it forces you to focus while also giving your mind a break. The text is written poetically and you start noticing associations and layers of meaning. Layers of your mind also start emerging. It’s a fascinating thing to observe.
After five years of classes, I transferred to eastern Tibet’s Tibetan Medical College of Qinghai University in Xining, China. Under the mentorship of senior doctors, I was able to do patient rounds in the gastroenterology department of the hospital there. All that memorization prepared my mind to have a strong presence with each patient and really focus on what each one said to me.
What are some of the distinctive aspects of Tibetan medicine?
Tibetan medicine co-evolved with Buddhism. Contemplative introspection into the mind is complemented by introspection into the body. For example, in the case of chronic pain, Tibetan medicine prescribes medication along with recommendations for diet and ways to reduce mental distress and suffering. Research has shown that some meditators can identify physical pain locales on their body but they don’t have the same mental response that a lot of other people have to it.
We’re one of the few species in the animal kingdom that can evoke stress just by thinking about a threat. What are the changes in the mind when you become afraid, jealous, angry or sad? These emotions create biological changes in the body. Tibetan medicine treats the mind and the body at the same time. If you have diabetes or hypertension, it can get worse if you are highly reactive to circumstances in your life. This phenomenon is related to a concept called rlung (pronounced loong). These are wind pathways in the body that the mind rides on, which in Western medicine is related to the neuroendocrine system.
Connecting the mind and body to treat patients is ancient practice in Tibetan medicine, but it has only started gaining importance in Western medicine in the past decade or so.
Do you think Tibetan medicine is superior to Western medicine?
No. I feel like there is a lot of learning to do on both sides. My dad is an orthopedic surgeon. There are some things that Western medicine does very well.
Modern Tibetan medical practitioners don’t do surgery but they may advocate it at times – historically, we performed minor procedures like cataract surgery. Our canon says that anything that benefits a person is Tibetan medicine. So if the results of an X-ray or blood test could give you valuable information about a patient, you would welcome that. It’s a realist perspective more than anything else. And I would also say that it’s more holistic.
Some people have such a suspicion of anything that’s not Western medicine, they just refuse to consider it. I find that non-scientific. The research done on other medical systems is so poor we can’t say that we know whether these things don’t work on some level. Westerners sometimes forget that a human connection is healing and we try to operationalize everything. We’re not allowed to have art in medicine, but sometimes that art is what makes it more effective.
All photos courtesy of Tawni Tidwell
Related:
Her patient approach to health: Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs
Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria
Monday, April 4, 2016
Celebrating math, miracles and a movie
By Carol Clark
“This is truly a joyful evening for me,” said Robin Forman, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, at a special advance screening for Emory alumni of the film “The Man Who Knew Infinity.”
“First of all, I’m a mathematician,” Forman said, “and like every other mathematician, I’ve been waiting for this film to come out ever since I heard about it.”
The movie appeals, however, to a much broader audience. Hundreds of Emory alumni turned out for the private screening, held recently at the Carter Center. The evening was a chance to celebrate Emory’s connection to the film – Ken Ono, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Math, served as an associate producer and the math consultant. The evening also celebrated how “miracles” of endurance, chance and unexpected human connections can overcome great odds to transform the world.
“The Man Who Knew Infinity,” to be released nationwide April 29, tells the true story of how a largely self-educated Indian named Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote to Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy in 1913, sparking an unlikely collaboration. The film stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons as Ramanujan and Hardy, whose “math bromance” spanned cultures and hierarchies to change math and science forever.
“What if Ramanujan had not reached out to Hardy?” Ono said in remarks before the screening. “The story of Ramanujan matters because science matters and imagination matters.”
He announced plans for a global contest called “The Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Search.” In partnership with the film’s producers – IFC Films and Pressman films – the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and Carnegie Mellon mathematician Po-Shen Loh, Ono will seek hidden math talent and match it to opportunities for advancement.
“Ramanujan represents untapped potential that we must believe in,” Ono said. “In that spirit, our goal is to scour the villages, towns and cities of the world in search of undiscovered talent.”
Just before World War I, Hardy invited Ramanujan to leave rural India and come to Cambridge University in England. Hardy helped guide the unfathomable genius of Ramanujan – who said his fantastic math formulas came to him as visions from a Hindu goddess. Hardy ensured that Ramanujan’s discoveries had lasting impact, and he lobbied to have him elected as a fellow at Trinity College, where Isaac Newton studied.
After watching the story unfold on the screen, audience members asked questions and provided feedback to a panel that flew in for the event, including Matthew Brown, the writer and director; Devika Bhise, who portrays Ramanujan’s wife, Janaki; and Samuel Pressman, a creative consultant for Pressman Films.
“To be here tonight with you all at the Carter Center is a miracle,” Brown said. “This project has been 10 years in the making. It was a true independent film, made on a really tight budget.”
The film takes its name and inspiration from a 1992 biography of Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel. Brown said he first picked up the book while visiting an aunt, who happened to be reading it for her book club, and he became captivated by the story. Hardy was an atheist and life-long bachelor with few close relationships. Ramanujan, on the other hand, was married, devoted to his family and extremely religious. He wrote that an equation had no meaning to him unless it was the thought of god.
“It was a miracle that Ramanujan came to Cambridge, and that Hardy took a chance on him,” Brown said. “I found the human aspect to be unbelievable, never mind the genius aspect. It was quite a story to jump into as a filmmaker.”
Brown was given Ono’s name as a Ramanujan expert who might be able to help keep the details right during filming. Ono is a number theorist who has solved many of the mysteries left behind by Ramanujan, revealing how his work relates to concepts that were largely unknown during his day, such as string theory and black holes.
“I emailed Ken,” Brown recalled, “and he was on an airplane within two days to be on set. Ken was our main man. He set all the math straight.” Brown said that his passion for filmmaking was more than matched by Ono’s passion for math.
“Congratulations on an exceedingly beautiful film,” one audience member told the panel. He added that he found Bhise’s portrayal of Janaki particularly moving.
Ramanujan had to leave his young wife behind in India to go to England and collaborate with Hardy. The harsh English climate combined with war-time rationing and Ramanujan’s strict vegetarian diet took their toll. He contracted tuberculosis while at Cambridge and died at age 32, a year after returning to India. In keeping with tradition, Janaki never remarried. She endured familial abandonment and poverty but strived to keep the legacy of her husband’s work alive.
“Obviously, this movie is very important to me,” Bhise said. “When you play a real human being, you have to do her life justice. Even though she didn’t understand the math produced by her husband, she understood the artistry, the passion and the genius underlying it.”
Sam Pressman said he gained a similar insight working on the film. “I never realized the beauty of math, and that the ideas of math are like art,” he said. “Our education system chooses to focus on the building blocks of mathematics. But there’s another way to think of math and we want to invite the world to appreciate it.”
Mathematician Po-Shen Loh and Mike Breen, from the AMS, joined the panel to discuss the plans for The Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Search. The contest will connect with youth through Expii.com, a new smart phone friendly learning platform that delivers math quizzes and instruction. Loh developed the software as part of his role as coach for the 2015 USA International Math Olympiad team – the first U.S. team to take gold in 21 years.
“Everyone with a smart phone can benefit from this interactive teaching system,” Loh said. “Our purpose is to reach out across the world and try to find the next Ramanujan.”
The movie and the talent search are a chance to “think about math in a fun way,” Breen said. “Perhaps the best way to generate interest and amazing performances in math might be to fuse math and entertainment.”
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Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Mathematicians find 'magic key' to drive Ramanujan's taxi-cab number
By Carol Clark
Taxi-cab numbers, among the most beloved integers in math, trace their origins to 1918 and what seemed like a casual insight by the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. Now mathematicians at Emory University have discovered that Ramanujan did not just identify the first taxi-cab number – 1729 – and its quirky properties. He showed how the number relates to elliptic curves and K3 surfaces – objects important today in string theory and quantum physics.
“We’ve found that Ramanujan actually discovered a K3 surface more than 30 years before others started studying K3 surfaces and they were even named,” says Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory. “It turns out that Ramanujan’s work anticipated deep structures that have become fundamental objects in arithmetic geometry, number theory and physics.”
Ono and his graduate student Sarah Trebat-Leder are publishing a paper about these new insights in the journal Research in Number Theory. Their paper also demonstrates how one of Ramanujan’s formulas associated with the taxi-cab number can reveal secrets of elliptic curves.
“We were able to tie the record for finding certain elliptic curves with an unexpected number of points, or solutions, without doing any heavy lifting at all,” Ono says. “Ramanujan’s formula, which he wrote on his deathbed in 1919, is that ingenious. It’s as though he left a magic key for the mathematicians of the future. All we had to do was recognize the key’s power and use it to drive solutions in a modern context.”
“This paper adds yet another truly beautiful story to the list of spectacular recent discoveries involving Ramanujan’s notebooks,” says Manjul Bhargava, a number theorist at Princeton University. “Elliptic curves and K3 surfaces form an important next frontier in mathematics, and Ramanujan gave remarkable examples illustrating some of their features that we didn’t know before. He identified a very special K3 surface, which we can use to understand a certain special family of elliptic curves. These new examples and insights are certain to spawn further work that will take mathematics forward.”
Ramanujan, a largely self-taught mathematician, seemed to solve problems instinctively and said his formulas came to him in the form of visions from a Hindu goddess. During the height of British colonialism, he left his native India to become a protégé of mathematician G.H. Hardy at Cambridge University in England.
By 1918, the British climate and war-time rationing had taken their toll on Ramanujan, who was suffering from tuberculosis. He lay ailing in a clinic near London when Hardy came to visit.
Wanting to cheer up Ramanujan, Hardy said that he had arrived in taxi number 1729 and described the number “as rather a dull one.” To Hardy’s surprise, Ramanujan sat up in bed and replied, “No, Hardy, it’s a very interesting number! It’s the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
Ramanujan, who had an uncanny sense for the idiosyncratic properties of numbers, somehow knew that 1729 can be represented as 1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed + 10 cubed, and no smaller positive number can be written in two such ways.
This incident launched the “Hardy-Ramanujan number,” or “taxi-cab number,” into the world of math. To date, only six taxi-cab numbers have been discovered that share the properties of 1729. (These are the smallest numbers which are the sum of cubes in n different ways. For n=2 the number is 1729.)
The original taxi-cab number 1729 is a favorite nerdy allusion in television sitcoms by Matt Groening. The number shows up frequently as an inside joke in episodes of “Futurama” and the “The Simpsons.”
But like much of Ramanujan’s discoveries, 1729 turned out to contain hidden meanings that make it much more than a charming mathematical oddity.
“This is the ultimate example of how Ramanujan anticipated theories,” Ono says. “When looking through his notes, you may see what appears to be just a simple formula. But if you look closer, you can often uncover much deeper implications that reveal Ramanujan’s true powers.”
Much of Ono’s career is focused on unraveling Ramanujan mysteries. In 2013, during a trip to England to visit number theorists Andrew Granville and John Coates, Ono rummaged through the Ramanujan archive at Cambridge. He came across a page of formulas that Ramanujan wrote a year after he first pointed out the special qualities of the number 1729 to Hardy. By then, the 32-year-old Ramanujan was back in India but he was still ailing and near death.
“From the bottom of one of the boxes in the archive, I pulled out one of Ramanujan’s deathbed notes,” Ono recalls. “The page mentioned 1729 along with some notes about it. Andrew and I realized that he had found infinitely near misses for Fermat’s Last Theorem for exponent 3. We were shocked by that, and actually started laughing. That was the first tip-off that Ramanujan had discovered something much larger.”
Fermat’s Last Theorem is the idea that certain simple equations have no solutions – the sum of two cubes can never be a cube. Ramanujan used an elliptic curve – a cubic equation and two variables where the largest degree is 3 – to produce infinitely many solutions that were nearly counter examples to Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Elliptic curves have been studied for thousands of years, but only during the last 50 years have applications been found for them outside of mathematics. They are important, for example, for Internet cryptography systems that protect information like bank account numbers.
Ono had worked with K3 surfaces before and he also realized that Ramanujan had found a K3 surface, long before they were officially identified and named by mathematician André Weil during the 1950s. Weil named them in honor of three algebraic masters – Kummer, Kähler and Kodaira – and the mountain K2 in Kashmir.
Just as K2 is an extraordinarily difficult mountain to climb, the process of generalizing elliptic curves to find a K3 surface is considered an exceedingly difficult math problem.
Ono and Trebat-Leder put all the pieces in Ramanujan’s notes together to produce the current paper, illuminating his finds and translating them into a modern framework.
“Ramanujan was using 1729 and elliptic curves to develop formulas for a K3 surface,” Ono says. “Mathematicians today still struggle to manipulate and calculate with K3 surfaces. So it comes as a major surprise that Ramanujan had this intuition all along.”
Ramanujan is well-known in India, and among mathematicians worldwide. He may soon become more familiar to wider audiences through an upcoming movie, “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” by Pressman Films. Ono served as a math consultant for the movie, which stars Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy. (Both Ono and Bhargava are associate producers for the film.)
“Ramanujan’s life and work are both a great human story and a great math story,” Ono says. “And I’m glad that more people are finally going to get to enjoy it.”
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Math theory gives glimpse into the magical mind of Ramanujan
Monday, August 3, 2015
Math shines with the stars in 'The Man Who Knew Infinity'
By Carol Clark
Call it a math bromance. Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy’s collaboration with the obscure, self-taught Indian Srinivasa Ramanujan – during the height of British colonialism – changed math and science forever. The story is finally going mainstream through a major motion picture, “The Man Who Knew Infinity," starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.
“It’s the story of a man who overcame incredible obstacles to become one of the most important mathematicians of his day,” says Emory mathematician Ken Ono, who served as a consultant for the film. “It’s a great human story. It’s true. And I’m glad that the world is finally going to get to enjoy it.”
The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) will feature a sneak peak of “The Man Who Knew Infinity” on August 6, as part of its centennial celebration, MathFest 2015, in Washington D.C. Ono, a leading expert on Ramanujan’s theories, will lead a panel discussion at the screening event, which begins at 5 pm at the Marriott Wardman Park. Panelists will include Princeton mathematician Manjul Bhargava; Robert Kanigel, who wrote the 1991 book that the movie is based on; and Matt Brown, the screenwriter and director of the movie.
The movie’s world premier is set for September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 1913, Ramanujan wrote a letter to Hardy, including creative formulas that clearly showed his brilliance. Hardy invited Ramanujan to come to Cambridge to study and collaborate, a daring move during a time of deep prejudice.
“Together, they produced phenomenal results,” Ono says. “They changed mathematics and they changed the course of science.”
A relatively unknown director, Matt Brown spent eight years trying to get the movie project off the ground. He eventually found backing from the producer Ed Pressman of Pressman Films.
“This is not your typical Hollywood film,” Brown says of the final product. “A lot of movies that deal with scientific subjects just mention the science and go straight to the human story. We wanted to honor the math in this film, so that mathematicians could appreciate it as well as other audience members. One way we tried to do that was to show the passion the characters have for the subject.”
When Brown called Ono out of the blue last August and asked him to help with the math on the film, Ono did not hesitate. He was soon on a plane from Atlanta to London to begin putting in 16-hour days on the set at Pinewood Studios with the cast and crew.
“I’ve never met anybody with more energy and enthusiasm for his work than Ken,” Brown says. “It was invaluable to me as a director to have him go over the script and make sure that the math was accurate. He was incredibly kind and patient. It gave me confidence.”
Ono also worked closely with the art department, to get details of the math visuals right, and coached the stars, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. “Ken helped the actors understand philosophically what was behind the mathematics,” Brown says. “He gave them a little window into it. That’s important because when an actor grasps the meaning of the lines, he can add nuance and subtext to a performance.”
Ultimately, the film is about the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan, Brown says. “Hardy fought really hard to get Ramanujan honored and bring him into the elite of Trinity College at Cambridge. Hardy basically staked his career on him.”
It was especially risky since Ramanujan did not work like a traditional academic. He did not see the need of providing proofs for his fantastic formulas, and believed that they came to him as visions from a goddess.
“Ramanujan saw the world, and math, in a spiritual way,” Brown says. “It’s incredible that he wound up at Cambridge with Hardy, an atheist, as his mentor.”
Unfortunately, while Hardy proved a great academic mentor for Ramanujan, it took longer for their friendship to evolve. “This movie tells a story about the cost that comes when people wait out of fear to connect more deeply in their relationships,” Brown says.
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Monday, June 8, 2015
Walt Disney's little-known 'Skeleton Dance'
Sean Braswell of OZY writes in USA Today about a disturbing encounter that the young Walt Disney had with an owl, and how it may have marked his later life and work. Following is an excerpt from the article:
"There is a persistent, and unsubstantiated, rumor that Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body resides in a vault, waiting to be restored to life when summer returns to Arendelle and modern science triumps over death. It's easy to see how the rumor may have been started since, from the beginning of Disney's career, as chronicled by professor Gary Laderman of Emory University, the American icon had a curious obsesson with death. As early as 1929, on the heels of his first big splash with Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie, Disney offered a biazrre follow-up entitled The Skeleton Dance, which opens, not surprisingly, with a terrified owl perched in a tree. ...
"The graveyard romp turned out to be a macabre hit, and over the next decades, as America faced economic hardship, war, nuclear annihilation and drastic social change, Disney's films helped the nation navigate good and evil, vice and virtue. And for most of his early tales, Laderman observes, 'death, or the threat of death, is the motor, the driving force that enlivens each narrative.'"
Read the whole article in USA Today.
Friday, May 22, 2015
BEINGS launches work on global consensus for ethical course of biotech
By Carol Clark
Some of the world’s preeminent scientists and bioethicists gathered with leaders of philosophy, sociology, law, policy and religion in Atlanta May 18-20 for BEINGS 2015. The landmark summit launched work on a global consensus for the direction of biotechnology for the 21st century.
The setting for this futuristic event: The Tabernacle, an historic former church turned music venue, with red walls swirled with murals and wood floors that creak like the deck of a ship. Novelist Margaret Atwood, creator of fictional laboratory creatures such as the pigoon, gave a keynote.
“The lid is off the Pandora’s Box of genetic modification,” Atwood said. “This is a pivotal moment. Deliberate well. Keep the bar high. Take precautions.”
And with that, the tumultuous voyage began.
BEINGS, short for Biotech and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit, was organized by Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. “The idea is audacious,” Wolpe admitted of their plan to write global guidelines for the aspirations, ethics and policies of biotechnology within the next eight months.
Paul Root Wolpe on the potential and perils of biotechnology:
The BEINGS delegates are up to the task, he added. About 135 delegates from 25 countries joined the summit to take up the challenge of charting a course for how biotechnology can best contribute to human flourishing while navigating the potential perils and ethical pitfalls.
Tensions soon emerged as delegates from different perspectives took the microphone.
Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker threw down the deregulatory gauntlet. “Stay out of the way” of biotech innovation, he urged, as scientists seek to prevent, treat and cure diseases. He cited major improvements in life expectancy around the world largely due to biomedical breakthroughs.
Pinker downplayed fears of eugenics and “designer” babies, while others countered that we are living in a world of competition and should be extremely concerned about the potential power to “edit” the genes of the human germline.
Princeton’s Ruha Benjamin, author of “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier,” called for the inclusion of those who identify as disabled in discussions about the goals and policies of biotechnology. “Anything less is presumptive and paternalistic,” she said.
It’s important to think about how to distribute benefits, added Benjamin, an assistant professor of African American Studies focused on issues of science and health. “There is no such thing as trickle-down biotech.”
Benjamin and three other delegates summarized their thoughts in an opinion piece for the Guardian: “As we pursue promising treatments, we should also be asking what we are trying to treat; whether it is best treated biomedically; who is included as funders, patients, donors and scientists; who is left out; who profits; and whether or not the treatment masks, depoliticizes, or exacerbates political and social inequality.”
By the afternoon of the first day of the summit, Wolpe said he knew the gathering was going to be a success. “I could tell by the tone of the conversation, and how people were lining up at the microphones to speak, that we had struck a chord,” he says. “We need to bridge a tension in philosophies, but both sides believe that curing human diseases and stopping suffering is an important goal. We have to get outside of the theoretical arguments and start talking about practical, specific issues.”
BEINGS divided discussions into the following major topic areas.
Aspirations and Goals: How should we think about differing goals of biotechnology, from making money, to curing disease, to understanding the basic nature of the organic world, to promoting human flourishing?
Alien Organisms and New (ID)entities: Cellular biotechnologies enable us to engineer novel organisms for industrial, environmental or therapeutic purposes. How might these organisms modify existing social systems and ecosystems, and how do we balance innovation with responsibility?
Bioterror/Bioerror: What are the potential dangers of synthetic biological materials and pathogens in terms of accidents or criminal intent?
Ownership: Should custom-designed genetic material or organisms be subject to patents and copyright?
Donorship: How can government and private sector entities collaborate to protect donors and create standards for bio- and stem-cell banks?
“All voices have a place,” Wolpe stressed. “We don’t have to agree on everything. Wherever we have honest, important disagreement in an area, we will note it in the final document.”
At the end of the summit, more than 80 delegates committed to actively working on writing the guidelines for the five major topic areas. Another 30 agreed to serve as reviewers and editors as drafts are ready. Their goal is to have a final document by next January, which they will submit for publication by a major journal.
“We do not represent just a single segment of society or government body or special interest,” Wolpe says. “We’re a group of global citizens who believe that for biotechnology to be used successfully it has to be used ethically. We as a group can create a document that is persuasive and has value.”
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Wednesday, May 6, 2015
The economics of hypnotic meditation
To graduate with honors from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, students must complete an honors thesis, a comprehensive project that involves months of original research and analysis on a topic of their choice under the guidance of a faculty adviser. The result is a final paper and an oral defense of their thesis to a faculty committee.
Hal Zeitlin's thesis is entitled: "Silent Economics: The Cooperative Effects of Hypnotic Meditation." His adviser was Kelli Lanier, instructor of economics.
"I examined the impact of meditation alone versus the same meditation preceded by hypnotic relaxation procedures on the economic cooperative behavior of 160 undergraduates," Zeitlin explains. "Hypnotic meditation is used to relax a meditator before they practice any scientifically valid form of meditation. There was a significant change of relaxation within the hypnotic group, greater than the change in the meditation-only group. The meditation-only group maintained cooperative behavior for two of three rounds, and the hypnotic group for all three. Since these results could be attributed to random variation, I recommend that the study be repeated with a larger sample."
A growing amount of scientific evidence has revealed that certain meditation practices can positively change the human brain. "I am interested in helping to introduce scientifically valid meditation practices into American schools, for the benefit of youth," Zeitlin says. "My thesis experience provided me an opportunity to begin a professional investigation into meditation and its effects on pro-social behavior."
Read about more honors thesis projects in Emory Report.
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Friday, May 9, 2014
The economics of happiness
What can economics, "the dismal science,” teach us about happiness?
Plenty, says Shomu Banerjee. A senior lecturer and applied microeconomic theorist at Emory, Banerjee was a presenter for the university’s recent Good Life Speaker Series.
“Happiness is related to our perspective, the way we choose to look at things,” he said in his talk. “And the definition of economics in this day and age is the study of choice: How do people choose things, how do they make decisions.”
He recalled an experience he had while walking on the Emory campus, when he noticed a woman in her early 30s standing at a bus stop and crying. “She had tears flowing from her eyes and there were all these people standing around and nobody was saying anything to her,” Banerjee said. “I said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s okay, thank you very much.’ And then she said, ‘You know, one day I’m going to look at this and laugh.’ So I said, ‘If you already know you’re going to look at this and laugh one day, why not start right now?’ And she did actually start laughing at that point.”
Once your basic needs are met, such as food, water and shelter, happiness becomes more about choice and perspective, and finding ways to create meaning in your everyday life, Banerjee said.
Banerjee, who was born in England, described his family as “pretty poor.” He grew up in Pakistan, Madagascar and Turkey, with occasional stints in India, before moving to the United States at 21.
“When I came to the United States, the thing that I wasn’t ready for was what a cold place this was in terms of relationships, relative to what I’d been exposed to,” he recalled.
Outside of primary relationships, he said, many people seem to consider their relationships as transactional, like the market environment that imbues so much of society. He urged students to go beyond the transactional and take the time to notice others and empathize with them.
Banerjee recalled a story from his college years in India. He had boarded a bus with no empty seats. He stood next to a seated man who was obviously a road worker. “Road workers worked with their hands and wore turbans to carry baskets of dirt. Their fingernails would be caked with mud,” Banerjee said. “Maybe this man saw the tired look on my face. He scoots up on his seat, makes a little space and says, ‘Sit down here.’”
The man had been sweating and was covered in grime from a day of labor in the hot sun. Banerjee hesitated. He politely declined the man’s offer to squeeze in next to him, giving the excuse that he didn’t want to crowd him.
“The man told me, ‘If there is space in your heart, then there is space here,’” Banerjee said. “Now this came from a man who is probably totally illiterate. I went into automatic mode and sat down. I wasn’t even thinking. This is what I mean by empathy. These things do make a difference in the quality of our lives, but we tend to forget how to relate to others.”
Watch the video of the talk by Shomu Banerjee:
Another key to happiness is choosing not to compare one’s self to others, Banerjee said. He told a story from his graduate school years: “I had a wonderful PhD advisor, Leonid Hurwicz, a Polish-American economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2007. He was Jewish, part of his family died in the Holocaust, but he never talked about those things, ever. Except this one time.”
When a faculty member came up for tenure, and Hurwicz was asked to rank the candidate next to other luminaries in the field, he told Banerjee: “How can I compare people, and say that this person is as good as A or not as good as B? I cannot do that. And more than that, I refuse to do it, because that was the kind of madness that the Nazis were engaged in.”
Banerjee encouraged students to choose to do things that they love, rather than search for direction by browsing the marketplace. “That’s appropriate for grocery shopping,” he said, “but for living I think it’s far more important to ask, ‘Who am I? What lights me up? What motivates me? Rather than just go from classroom to classroom or major to major, shopping.”
He also advised them to make a list of simple activities that nurture their spirits and to do these things from time to time. He recalled feeling overwhelmed when he was a graduate student working on his thesis, and how he would escape that feeling by sitting beneath a tree to feed the campus squirrels.
“The challenge was getting them to actually eat out of my hand,” he said. “For those 10 to 12 moments that I was trying to feed the squirrels, I was really enjoying this inter-species interaction. I was in the moment. I was not thinking about, ‘If I don’t get my thesis I’ll have to go back to India with my tail between my legs.’”
Banerjee still makes time for activities to nurture his spirit. “Last year, around Thanksgiving, my daughter and I climbed Stone Mountain early in the morning,” he said. “We went up in the dark and watched the sun rise. It kept me going for months. It really filled me with joy. I don’t know why. Maybe it connected me with my human ancestors who looked at the sun and didn’t know what it was and were totally amazed. But I was equally amazed in the 21st century. It’s the beginning of a day, so much promise, all those things that make me feel happy.”
Many students who come to him for advice do not have a strong calling, Banerjee said. One of the hardest decisions they have to make is what to do with themselves.
He offered a quote by the late Howard Thurman, an African-American civil rights leader, who said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Photo credits: Top, iStockphoto.com; center, NASA; bottom, Wikipedia
Friday, October 11, 2013
Emory-Tibet science project rolls out bridges to inner and outer worlds
By Carol Clark
If you want to make a significant contribution for a better world, “take care of both the brain and the heart.” That was the overriding message of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Emory’s Presidential Distinguished Professor, during his recent visit to campus.
The Robert A. Paul Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) is one way the Dalai Lama would like to incorporate that message into education. He presided over a luncheon celebrating the full implementation phase of the ETSI, an initiative started in 2007 to exchange knowledge between modern scientists and Tibetan monastics trained in ancient, contemplative methods of developing empathy, compassion and other beneficial mental states.
“The ETSI bridges two worlds that are too often separate: Science and the inner world of human values, beliefs and emotions,” said Robin Forman, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. “His Holiness realizes that both hold great value.”
Emory faculty and Tibetan scholars collaborated to develop introductory Tibetan-English science textbooks in neuroscience, biology and physics, and to lead classes for Tibetan monastics. Nearly 100 monks and nuns have participated in the development phase of the ETSI. Last May, six Tibetan monks completed a three-year science instruction program at Emory, and they will now lead the teaching efforts back in India, the seat of the Tibetan diaspora, with the continued support of Emory science faculty. With funding from the Dalai Lama Trust and Emory College, 36 more monastic teachers will be trained at Emory over the next 10 years.
“What a joyful experience it has been,” Forman said of the ETSI. He noted that the Tibetan monastics see a comprehensive science curriculum not as a threat to their Buddhist tradition, but as “a way of protecting, preserving, enhancing and even energizing their unique culture and civilization.”
The Dalai Lama called the large-scale implementation of the curriculum, set for 2014, as “the most critical phase.” The roll-out will include: The development of 19 high-level bilingual science textbooks; annual six-week intensives taught by international science faculty in three major monastic institutions in south India, with a total student body of more than 10,000; and year-round distance learning classes for monasteries and nunneries.
The ETSI grew out of the Emory Tibet Partnership, founded by Robert Paul, an Emory professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies, and Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, a senior lecturer in Emory’s Department of Religion and director of the ETSI. Watch the video, below, to learn more about the ETSI formation:
So far, the ETSI has hosted five International Conferences on Science Translation into Tibetan and coined more than 2,500 new science terms for the language.
“Translation is one of the most important sources of knowledge for every evolving civilization,” said Tsondue Samphel, a member of the ETSI translation team. Samphel trained as a novice monk in Dharamsala, India, before returning to secular life and earning a physics degree from Emory in 2006.
Samphel described how translators played a role in bringing Buddhism from other countries to Tibet, and in helping the religion evolve into a form of Buddhism unique to the Himalayan kingdom.
“Now, more than 1,000 years later, another historic event is taking place,” Samphel said of the effort to promote the cross-fertilization of ancient Tibetan wisdom and modern scientific understanding. “This could advance the welfare of all humanity to a higher level."
The cross-fertilization is already contributing to science discoveries at Emory. For instance, Cognitively Based Compassion Training, a secular meditation protocol based on Tibetan traditions, has demonstrated significant beneficial effects on immune and hormonal response to psychosocial stress among Emory undergraduate students. These promising research results led to an ongoing NIH-funded study on the health benefits of compassion training.
The ETSI “changed my life,” said Arri Eisen, a professor of biology, who is among the Emory faculty who has spent summers in India teaching the monastics. He said the experience of engaging in intense discussions with the monastics made him a better teacher.
Most of his Tibetan students do not have a goal of becoming a scientist. “They are learning science to help them understand Buddhism better, to make them better Buddhists, and to become more enriched citizens,” Eisen said.
“I’m representing just a small piece of the power of this thing,” he said. “This project has transformed me, it’s transformed many monks and nuns, and I think that’s just the beginning.”
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Compassion meditation may boost neural basis of empathy
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