Note on the Nature of Reality

What it is

This is a brief recorded dialogue between Rabindranath Tagore and physicist Albert Einstein, published as an appendix to Tagore's 1931 book The Religion of Man, which was drawn from his 1930 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford.

Why it matters

The conversation set a poet-philosopher against a physicist on the question of whether truth and reality exist independently of human consciousness, or depend on the human mind. It captures a famous meeting between two of the most celebrated thinkers of the early twentieth century, representing very different ways of understanding the universe — one spiritual and humanistic, the other scientific.

Look closer

• Why would a poet and a physicist be invited to discuss the nature of reality together?
• Can you find a place where Tagore and Einstein seem to disagree?
• What does this conversation suggest about how science and the humanities can talk to each other?