More than 30 Tibetan monks, plus a handful of nuns, will be collaborating with a team from San Francisco’s Exploratorium (”the museum of art, science and human perception”) to build exotic machines to create patterns from sunlight using cardboard, dowels, reflective sheets of mylar and electronic components.

If all goes to plan, the monks will return to their monasteries and start spreading the joys of scientific exploration among other followers of their religion.

The project is the latest reflection of the monks’ spiritual leader’s fascination with science. In the Dalai Lama’s 2005 book The Universe in a Single Atom, the Nobel peace laureate argued that science and spiritual inquiry have much to learn from one other.

According to an Exploratorium press release, the Dalai Lama has been exploring how cosmology, neuroscience, and other fields interrelate with Buddhism since childhood (His Holiness does tend to be precocious). Now he’s setting his monks on an “ambitious” mission to “share not only in the traditions of Buddhism, but…also in Western scientific inquiry and evidence on the physical plane” with a goal of “shap[ing] these already highly educated monks into science leaders.”

Now if we could just get the Pope to follow suit…

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