As the development of new technology allowed physicists to peer into unknown territory, they found data that they could model with mathematics, but not talk about, nor understand, with their traditional views of reality. Millennia before, Eastern mystics had run into similar problems with their exploration of an intuitive comprehension of reality. When physicists and Eastern mystics attempt to put their understanding into words they sound amazingly similar. This connection was first remarked upon by Western physicists after they toured the Orient following World War 2. It became part of popular thinking with the publishing of the book The Tao of Physics (and similar books) in the 1970's.
"The general notions about human understanding...which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, and encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." Robert Oppenheimer, 1954.
"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory...[we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." Niels Bohr, 1958
"The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics
that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication
of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition
of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory."
Werner Heisenberg, 1958