is the Gita dishonest?

[Arun Gupta]

IMO, comparison of the teaching of Quantum Mechanics to the Gita
is appropriate in more ways than one.

To me, both Gita and Quantum Mechanics teach some practical methods
to do something (live life, predict and compute physical phenomena).
This is at an operational level.

In the cases of Gita and Quantum Mechanics there is significant
disagreement among practitioners about the meaning of what it is
that we are doing, with no harm to the operational level.

You may fill in a list of different interpretations for the Gita;
for Quantum Mechanics there are
the Copenhagen interpretation (Bohr),
the causal interpretation (Bohm),
the many-worlds interpretation (Everett),
the transactional interpretation (Cramer),
and several others I am not familiar with.

Please note that in Quantum Mechanics, all the practitioners come up
with the same predictions for experiments, calculate in the same way, etc.;
the problems arise, to quote one on-web paper,

"... just where concepts like understanding, meaning, or sense are dealt
with. They appear when we ask what quantum mechanics might mean for our view
of the world (Weltanschauung) or even when we ask questions after the why of
the theory in a very broad sense. On this level there certainly is a
problem."

95% of the practitioners of physics do not worry about interpretational
issues; and neither should practitioners of the Gita (IMO). The conflicts
among interpreters are irrelevant to Quantum Mechanics and to Gita (IMO).

-Arun Gupta