Linda Shore and her husband David Barker, Sonoma residents for the past 20 years, have traveled to Northern India a dozen times to teach science to Tibetan Buddhist monks. The couple bring some unique talents and experience to the task; both were long-term employees at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the hands-on science museum started in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the noted physicist Robert Oppenheimer who led the Manhattan Project during World War II.
The Science for Monks project was started 25 years ago through a combination of efforts. The Dalai Lama, expelled from Tibet by the Communist Chinese in 1950, has always had an interest in science, and has explicitly expressed his opinion that if Buddhist ideas are proven wrong by science, Buddhism should change. As head of the Galugpa Buddhists, one of a handful of Buddhist schools and considered the most intellectual, the Dalai Lama welcomed the program with open arms.
Backed by the philanthropy of Bobby Sagar, the program began in the year 1999 after Sagar and the Dalai Lama met in Los Angeles and agreed to initiate a program of teaching science in Buddhist monasteries…