Ramakrishna V. Hosur on when Science Meets Spirituality

The Knowmads Podcast

Science and philosophy have always been woven together. Some of history’s greatest minds—Aristotle, Galileo, Aryabhata and even Einstein—were as much philosophers as they were scientists.

This has also been true for ancient Indian civilization, where science and philosophy were explored with extraordinary depth, not as separate pursuits, but as complementary paths to knowledge.

These insights were preserved in Sanskrit, a language whose precision allowed complex ideas to be recorded with remarkable clarity. But centuries
of invasions and nearly a thousand years of foreign rule made this knowledge less accessible, and its nuance steadily eroded.

Much of it was collapsed into the broad label of “spirituality”—a word that has itself lost the rigor and depth it once carried. The central dogma of these ancient Indian texts was an uncompromising commitment to curiosity
and questioning.

Our guest today, Dr. Ramakrishnan Hosur, apart from being a renowned figure in science, has embarked on the journey of demystifying these texts with that same uncompromising commitment. He believes in building upon that curiosity and using it as an anchor for scientific progress. In his book, Where Science Meets Spirituality, he explores precisely this intersection.

Dr. Hosur is a distinguished biophysicist and his remarkable career spans pioneering developments in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, structural biology, and protein folding. His work earned him India’s fourth-highest
civilian honour, the Padma Shri, in 2014. He has spent decades at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, where he also headed the National Facility for High-Field NMR. And now, he has been inspiring a whole new way of looking at knowledge by demystifying ancient Indian texts and showing how curiosity can bridge science and spirituality.

So if you’re someone who finds inspiration at the crossroads of science, philosophy and spirituality, or simply someone who’s just curious, you’re in for a treat. So let's go.

His wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakrishna_V._Hosur