Dear Prabhus,
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
A number of the devotees in Alachua who worked closely with Sadaputa Prabhu, especially since he moved here in the early 1990s, have in cooperation with Sadaputa’s wife, collected and organized his papers so to make them available to future researchers. We are working under the auspices of the GBC BI Committee and have already sent an initial digital collection to Hari Sauri Prabhu and the Bhaktivedanta Research Center in Kolkata for use by the TOVP-Mayapura project. Also in the works is a Sadaputa Prabhu memorial website to be coordinated with the Krishna.com team, where these materials will be made available in a digital research library format.
In the course of our collecting, we were able to produce this short biographical sketch highlighting Sadaputa’s scientific and devotional accomplishments. We primarily used his professional name, Richard L. Thompson, which Sadaputa utilized for his devotional books and scientific papers. In contrast, he wrote nearly 40 BTG essays as Sadaputa dasa.
Any and all feedback, as well as additional information about devotional experiences with Sadaputa Prabhu, will be most appreciated. Please contact Krishna-kripa dasa at:
[email protected]. As many of you know, Krishna-kripa served as Sadaputa Prabhu’s research assistant for nearly twenty years since their days in San Diego.
Your servants,
Sthita-dhi-muni dasa & Krishna-kripa dasa
Richard L. Thompson [Sadaputa Dasa] (February 4, 1947–September 18, 2008) was a mathematician, scientist, philosopher, researcher of ancient cosmology, author, and devoted practitioner of bhakti-yoga. He was born in Binghamton, New York, and received a B.S. in mathematics and physics from State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. He earned his M.A. in mathematics the following year at Syracuse University. In 1974, Thompson received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, where he specialized in probability theory and statistical mechanics. During this time he found inspiration in the philosophy of Bhagavad-gita, and became an initiated disciple of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, founder-acarya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement.
In his professional career, Thompson pursued research in quantum theory and mathematical biology, as well as NASA-funded research in satellite remote sensing. He produced nearly two-dozen peer reviewed scientific papers and co-authored a college textbook on computer modeling of biological systems. Thompson also worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, and as a research fellow and staff scientist at the La Jolla Institute in San Diego.
Thompson was a founding member of the scientific branch of ISKCON, the Bhaktivedanta Institute, where he published over fourteen technical papers on the study of the relationship between science and Vedanta. He also contributed over forty essays for a broad audience in Back to Godhead, “the magazine of the Hare Krishna movement.” Thompson extensively investigated ancient Indian astronomy, cosmology, and spirituality, and developed multimedia expositions on these topics. He wrote eight books on subjects ranging from consciousness to archeology and ancient astronomy.
Education and Early Career:
Richard Leslie Thompson was born in Binghamton, NY on February 4, 1947. He received a B.S. in mathematics and physics at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. In 1970 he earned an M.A. in mathematics from Syracuse University, and later received a National Science Fellowship.
In 1974, Thompson completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University, where he specialized in probability theory and statistical mechanics. Thompson’s dissertation, Equilibrium States of Thin Energy Shells, was published in the Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, No. 150,i for being “correct, new and significant” and “of sufficient interest to a substantial number of mathematicians.”ii The work included the Hare Krishna mantra printed on the dedication page. Thompson presented a paper on his research, “Information and Random Automata,” at the Annual Meetings of the American Mathematical Society in 1979, held in Biloxi, Mississippi (meeting #763).
Bhaktivedanta Institute:
Thompson was one of the founding members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute (BI), initially established in 1975 under the directorship of Dr. T. D. Singh (Bhaktiswarupa Damodara Maharaja). He wrote many of the Institute’s early monographs and essays on the topics of consciousness, archeology, and cosmology. Thompson presented papers at the BI’s first conference held in Vrindavana, India (1977). He also presented a paper, “God and the Laws of Physics”iii at Bhaktivedanta Institute’s “World Congress of the Synthesis of Science and Religion” held in Mumbai (1986), and “A Trans-Temporal Approach to Mind-Brain Interaction,” at BI’s “The Study of Consciousness Within Science” conference (1990) hosted at the University of San Francisco.
In 1984, Thompson served as senior editor for the first edition of a Bhaktivedanta Institute project titled, Origins: Higher Dimensions in Science. Under his Vaisnava name, Sadaputa dasa, Thompson is also listed as senior researcher, with Madhavendra Puri dasa (Stephen Bernath) as assistant. Drutakarma dasa (Michael Cremo) and Bhutatma dasa (Austin Gordon, Ph.D.), contributed as authors along with Thompson. The editors presented the project as a non-technical review of current scientific theories of the origin of the universe, the origin of living organisms, and the nature of the conscious self. Our basic finding is that the reductionistic world view of modern science is by no means solidly established; we therefore outline an alternative view in which the world is understood to be only partially quantifiable and in which both purpose and spiritual qualities are granted existence.iv
In 1993, Thompson spoke at the 100th anniversary conference of the Chicago Parliament of World’s Religions on “The Relation Between Science and Religion: The Contribution of Gaudiya Vaisnavism.”v Thompson printed the talk as a BI essay with the title, “Reflections on the Relationship Between Religion and Modern Rationalism.” It was similarly published as “Rational ‘Mythology’” in BTG 28.1 (1994) and in God & Science, (Thompson, 2004). Thompson presented another paper, “Anomalous Textual Artifacts in Archeo-astronomy,” at the 1996 World Association of Vedic Studies (WAVES) conference held in Atlanta.vi
Thompson published two BI themed papers in peer reviewed alternative science journals: “Numerical Analysis and Theoretical Modeling Of Causal Effects of Conscious Intention” (1991) in Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine,vii and “Planetary Diameters in the Surya-Siddhanta” (1997) in Journal of Scientific Exploration.viii Thompson commented that a number of his professional scientific papers also explored themes in relation to his BI research.
Christopher Beetle (Krishna Kripa dasa), a computer science graduate of Brown University, worked with Thompson as a Bhaktivedanta Institute research associate and production assistant, between 1988 and 2004.
Professional Work:
During the 1980s, Dr. Thompson pursued research in quantum physics and mathematical biology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, publishing numerous papers with Dr. Narendra S. Goel, of SUNY’s Department of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering. Over the next two decades Goel and Thompson also co-authored NASA-funded research papers on satellite remote sensing.ix
Thompson taught courses in image processing and advance remote sensing at SUNY in the early 1980s. Thompson also served as a post-doctoral fellow under Brian Josephson at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge from 1984-1985, followed by two years as a research fellow and staff scientist at the La Jolla Institute, Division of Applied Nonlinear Problems, in California.
Goel and Thompson’s essay on “Movable Finite Automata: A New Tool for Computer Modeling of Living Systems,” was published in The Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife ’87) held at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.x The conference was “jointly sponsored by the Center for Nonlinear Studies [at Los Alamos National Laboratory], the Santa Fe Institute, and Apple Computer, Inc.” that “brought together 160 computer scientists, biologists, physicists, anthropologists . . . all of whom shared a common interest in the simulation and synthesis of living systems.” The conference organizers stated Goel and Thompson’s paper “describes a tool for modeling molecular self-organization” that among other advantages, “can help explain the manner in which the genotype can control the specific sequential developmental history of the phenotype.”xi Thompson is additionally listed on the Second Artificial Life Workshop (February 5-9, 1990) Tuesday evening schedule as demonstrating “A Self-Assembly Model of a Bacterial Flagella Motor”.
Goel and Thompson also presented two papers for the International Symposium on Organizational Constraints on the Dynamics of Evolution, sponsored by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1987 in Budapest. Under the heading “Biological automata models and evolution”, the papers were individually titled, “I: The role of computer modeling in theories of evolution and the origins of life,”xii and “II: The evolution of macromolecular machinery.”xiii The celebrated British theoretical evolutionary biologist and co-editor of the conference proceedings, John Maynard Smith, wrote in the his “Concluding Remarks”:
For me, one of the high spots of the conference was the account by Thompson and Goel of their biological automata models. It was not only that I was envious of the