Florian Weps:
Quackum-Mechanics can serve as a spiritual teaching leading to genuine awakening, that's true. The dogma of the most deranged suicide cult can also serve in that role. Buddhism can. Birds taking off from a tree-branch can.

Quackum. I'm going to use that! But while I thought we were converging, maybe we're not. Or maybe we are -- let's see. (Although I realize I'm veering way off the original gold thread. Just roll your eyes and ignore me if this isn't fun or useful for you. I'll understand.)
Yes, I agree that even madness can be helpful, provided one is careful not to *become* mad. You can actually make money from a stock market bubble. But I wasn't talking about QM madness -- the Quackery -- being useful in the contemplative path. I'm talking about the *non* madness being useful. For me at least, the fact that when you observe which of two slits a photon passes through you stop it acting as a wave -- i.e. hard core, non-quackish, orthodox QM -- is one of the most profound things I have ever encountered, and if it tells me anything at all it tells me that in a very true way, nothing around me in the "physical" world is as it seems. What we think is "real" isn't real. The whole thing is one huge illusion[1]. I'm not being figurative here; I mean it exactly as it looks. We are, quite literally, in a Matrix.
As I say, for me -- scientifically trained, and probably as hard-core skeptical of fluff as you'll find -- that is profound. And I didn't actually "get" it until *after* I'd finished shoving around problems with the Time Dependent Schroedinger Equation, eigenvalues of system of particles, and so on. It's only when I noticed the increasing volume of chatter among the hoi polloi (and by that I mean a large subset of biologists and neuroscientists

) about how "the universe is all there is" or "one day science will explain everything" or "consciousness is an emergent property of the brain" that I began to gather together the set of thoughts that, combined, now say:
"WTF are you people talking about? Go read even some basic physics and you'll realize that what you're saying is worse than wrong, it's just non-sense!" [2] (That is, of course, a bit rich on my part because, as I say, I myself didn't get it via basic, or even moderately advanced (doctoral level), physics.)
Incidentally, the reason I find this relevant to Buddhism is probably obvious. The profundity being hinted at by QM may already been spotted 2,500 years ago by some bloke in India. WTF!? It's like reading the reading the book of Leviticus and finding something that smells suspiciously like references to P being equal to NP in computational complexity. It's like finding Fermat's famous marginal note in his copy of Arithmetica. That's tantalizing.
But actually, it's more than that. The *concepts* present in QM may have been spotted by the Buddha. And of course he probably wasn't the first, nor is he the only "old dead guy" (as Daniel calls them) to have pondered such things. The Greeks not long after him were not devoid of an idea or too. What's tantalizing is not that the Buddha pondered such things, but that he may actually have *seen* them -- experienced them.
As I've said elsewhere, it's like a bunch of musicologists who had only ever worked with musical scores, and then for someone to walk in one day and put on a CD of Beethoven's 5th. I don't know if that's actually the case here. Maybe it is, or maybe the Buddha was just the Chopra (in the bad sense) of his day. But I'm sure as hell not going to sit around and not try to find out which it is.
Wait! No, I *am* going to sit around and thereby try to find out which it is.

If I remember correctly, my maths profs were thoroughly unhappy with the physicist's fast-and-loose understanding of calculus. They were indeed asking "what does it mean" of "approaching infinity" or "approaching zero" expression and would seriously wrinkle their brows at any attempt to gloss over them.
I'm surprised any self-respecting maths prof would deign to get her hands soiled with such uncouth matters

I think it's true to say that as "purity" of the maths tends to infinity, then the meaning of:
"The limit, as x tends to zero, of sin(x)/x is one"
tends to:
"The limit, as x tends to zero, of sin(x)/x is one"
Also, Newton proposed the "Field". What does it mean?
Pretty, tricksy lights. That's all any of physics means; pretty, tricksy lights. But, to quote Gollum, in LoTR:
"Careful, or hobbits go down to join the Dead ones and light little candles. Follow Smeagol! Don't look at the lights!"Robert
[1] Careful. I'm not saying that there is no reality at all. Just that it's muddle-headed to think that the stuff of physics -- electrons and planets and bears (oh my!) -- is it.
[2] I wish I could do a good Mr. T impression. I always imagine myself being interviewed by someone on my views on the scientific materialism of people like Dawkins and so on and saying,
"Ah pity the fool who believes that consciousness supervenes on the so-called physical brain! Ah pity the fool!"