Is it true that Physics confirms some of the Buddha's teachings? I've heard it said that some observations in modern Physics effectively confirm some of the things the Buddha taught.


Is that true?
If so, could someone provide some examples?
This is dangerous ground, and liable to a lot of fluffy thinking, especially when referring to the area I like to call "Quackum Mechanics". But fluff aside, I think the notion is indeed true. And it's not a surprise since both Buddhism and Physics are trying to understand the nature of reality.

One example is in fact that very-prone-to-new-age-woo area of Quantum Mechanics. Staying clear of the woo, and although there's still a lot of debate over how to interpret the results, I don't think there's much if any debate over the idea that whatever reality is, it's not what it looks like. 

Now until QM came along, that idea -- that the underlying cause of our experience cannot be said to be the same as the experiences it causes -- was respectable among philosophers and philosophically minded scientists which, back in the day was almost all scientists. After all, "Physics" was often called, until only very recently, "Natural Philosophy". But it wasn't at that point a "scientific" idea. It was metaphysics.

However, with the advent of QM, the double-slit experiment, entanglement, and so on, we now have scientific reasons to believe that idea, as well as philosophical/metaphysical ones. We now know, for example, that whatever an electron "is", it's not simply a wee ball whirling around a blob of slightly larger balls. Now some interpretations of QM would go even further and say that whatever an electron is, it's some function of a consciousness interacting with something else. In other words, that interpretation says that "reality" is not properly described as subject/object -- that is, reality is "non-dual".

So I'd consider all of that to be a confirmation of one aspect of the kind of metaphysics proposed by the Buddha. He claims to have experienced some aspect of these things -- the illusory nature of our experiences, and the non-duality -- that only now, 2,500 years later, our Western science is beginning to pick up on. 

Now, again, caution is needed. I don't for a minute think that the Buddha knew about the double-slit result, or could work with Schrödinger's equation and so on. In understanding his position in this I'd use the analogy of selective breeding versus genetic engineering. The Buddha is like the expert cattleman who over years of selective breeding transforms wild animals into domesticated cows. But he may not know the full details of how he does what he does. Then, in that same analogy, the Physicist is like the modern gene expert who now understands in scientific detail what the cattleman had figured out in general by practical trial and error.