Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics: Toward a Union of Love and Knowledge.(Book review)

TIBETAN BUDDHISM AND MODERN PHYSICS: TOWARD A UNION OF LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE. By Vic Mansfield. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008. xii + 180 pp.

Although I never met Vic Mansfield in person, I was sad to learn, as I sat down to write the review of this book, that he had passed away last summer after a two-year bout with lymphoma, just shortly after this volume had been released from the printer. Mansfield received his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Cornell University and taught at Colgate University from 1973 until his death. Over his long teaching career, he published a number of essays in scholarly and physics journals as well as book chapters. Prior to the book under review, he had also written Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making: Understanding Jungian Synchronicity through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosophy (Open Court, 1995), and Head and Heart: A Personal Exploration of Science and the Sacred (Quest, 2002). All three volumes are similar in the sense that Mansfield was writing autobiographically about his work at the interface of science and Buddhist philosophy. It was precisely in this sense that I felt a personal loss in learning about his demise, much more than just that an author, or a physicist, or a philosopher had died. The following reflections on Mansfield's latest and final testament are presented in his memory, in the hopes that they might spark others, including Christian readers of this journal, toward the union of love and knowledge that he sought.

Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics unfolds over …