A physicist, mathematician and Zen master walk into a bar

An inquiry into the surprising connection between Albert Einstein, Georg Cantor and Dogen Zenji.

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It never ceases to amaze me how many non-trivial similarities exist between ancient spiritual writings and modern discoveries in physics and mathematics. This gives credence to the age old adage that the truth is reshaped and reformulated for every new generation. I want to examine how a few paradoxical passages from Dogen’s famous Zen text Genjo Koan can be seen through the lens of two triumphs of modern thought: Einstein’s Theories of Special and General Relativity and Georg Cantor’s work in Set Theory.

Space and Time

If I am running and you are stationary, time is passing more slowly for me than for you. If you are standing on the top of a mountain and I’m on the surface of the Earth, time is passing more slowly for me than you. These are both unintuitive consequences of Einstein’s theories of relativity. Time is slowed in the presence of a gravitational field, and slows down proportional to your velocity. There is no universal clock against which all events are measured, nor is there a container of space in which all events occur. Space and time…