Oppenheimer or the Inevitability of Doom
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
In Hindu cosmology, the world cycles between birth, life, and destruction. At the ending stage of a cycle of the universe, Shiva, manifest as Nataraj, the god of dance, performs the dance of destruction, Tandava. After the Tandava, the universe is dissolved, only to be reborn again, signifying the endless cycle of life and death in the cosmos.
In the Hindu vision of the world, there is no progress. The world is endlessly cycling between its birth and its death. Hence the ultimate goal of Hinduism (and many variants of Buddhism) is the escape of rebirth: Nirvana is the state that transcends the wheel of Dharma.
The Christian notion of the world is a different one. There is a light at the end of the tunnel: there is the second coming of Christ, the object at the end of time, and there is paradise to be reached. But (wo)man was expelled from paradise for the sin of thought, for the sin of eating from the apple of self-awareness. And so (wo)man has to strive towards realizing this notion of paradise in the world.
And even while Christianity has been on the decline in the West for centuries, following the reformation…
