Some thoughts on science and Chinese traditional culture

It is fun and exiting to find some similarities between the precise science world and mysterious Chinese traditional culture.

Newtonian science believed that “God does not play dice with the universe”, meaning that nature is a deterministic system which can be predicted and traced back if the initial state is well known. It is like those problems in our high school examination papers-calculate the situation of a particle at some point of time, given its initial position, velocity together with the forces acting on it. Since we can break a system into particles (reductionism), we can forecast its further evolution  or reconstruct its earlier state. Thus Newtonian science believes everything is "planned", everything has its cause and will have its effect. It is called causality, the relationship between cause and effect.

This reminds me of the causality, or karma, in Buddhism. Chinese Buddhists believe in the relationship between cause and effect. Everything at present is the cause of the future, as well as the effect of the past.  All the creatures struggle painfully and endlessly in the karmic cycle of transmigration. They also believe that everything is determined because of the karma.

The development of quantum physics, chaos theory, system science and complexity science casts doubt on Newtonian science. There are uncertainty, like the state of a particle in quantum physics. There are relationships, meaning the whole is more than the sum of parts. Thus scientists realized that they should treat system as a whole instead of breaking it into increasingly small particles. Particles are homogeneous, but when being together in different ways, they could show various phenomena, that's why we have such beautiful world. And just by learning the particles we cannot explain the diversity at all.
This reminds me of the difference between the western medicine and Chinese medicine. In western medicine, doctors treat a patient's feet if he feels pain in feet, and treat his face if he has pimples on the face. Western medicine is really focused on "parts". In contrast, a doctor learning Chinese medicine will condition the entire body of the patient. So after some time, the patient not only recovers from the disease but also finds himself aglow with health. Not just the body, Chinese medicine even takes into consideration of the season, the time and the location. So we can see Chinese medicine actually regards the patient as a part of the entire system of the world, and adopts a systematic view when curing diseases. So can we say Chinese medicine also belongs to system science? :-D

Learning and thinking is so much fun! :)