...Seems a good place for me to start. Perhaps I'll look at Einstein's views & then over Hindu cosmology... any guidance as to where to look?...
Well i'm just (badly) paraphrasing einstein: He was pretty much against organised religion and the usual ideas of 'god', though he considered himself agnostic not atheist (he liked Spinoza's pantheism i think) - though there are plenty of quotes around (many probabaly misquotes) which show he was a bit more 'mystical' than the average physicist.
His view of time was pretty determinist though (like destiny and that); i don't like that so i chukced in
Many Worlds theory on top: Many Worlds/Everett/Wheeler hypothesis is also basically deterministic - it solves the quantum problem by saying there's a new universe for every choice that can be made (like in one universe the particle goes through left slit, and in another through the right) - at the particle level, the freshly split universes overlap slightly, hence the wave interference even from one photon - so no need for a collapsing wavefunction; the downside is it requires there to be 10^100 universes different from ours by only one particle (and god knows how many others) - it does remove the 'weirdness' of quantum mechanics (waves of probability and such), but most physicists can't stomach it (they're mostly pretty concrete types - they've got equations that work, so they'd rather not think about how kooky it all is).
David Deutsch's
The Fabric of Reality is a good in-depth look at the many worlds hypothesis; though it's quite heavy (if you haven't read much physics,
John Gribbin books might be better - he does popular science books on quantum physics/cosmology that are really easy to read and 'get' (though still cover it properly)).
I skimmed a book by Paul Dirac about his work on quantum time (can't remember the book, i read about it elsewhere too). This basically says at a quantum level there's no real arrow of time - time can go forward or backward and the equations work out the same. He also gives this idea of stacked 'moments' existing in themselves without need of an arrow of time - the 'causality' is just a traceable line through a sequence of adjacent moments, but as far as the equations are concerned this has no fundamental direction
(here's a link i googled about similar stuff -
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-09/book-excerpt-there-no-such-thing-time)
...
Though maybe more cosmic-hippy-hindu-influenced physics would be more up your street: Try
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra - slightly old physics, but loads of comparisons with hindu/buddhist/taoist writings - really good. His later book
The Web of Life is good too, focussing more on interesting biology/self-organising systems/fractals.
...
I'm not really sure what to recommend for hindu cosmology: it's a really varied faith with loads of different sects with different emphases and mythologies. I wouldn't want to recommend actually joining it (except maybe in some mellow less mainstream denomination) - it's got loads of ancient 'wisdom' worked out from heavy yoga, but it's also got a fair dollop of nastiness, like the caste system - (to emphasise again hinduism's not a single faith (though the new indian government would like it thought that way)).
I suppose the
Bhagavad Gita is a fair place to start (nice and short) if you want to read actual hindu texts (some cosmology, but loads of other stuff too). I just pick and choose what i fancy as a rule: google it and see what comes up (there are some cool Krishna-based cosmologies on the internet somewhere;....
here we are - that's well sci-fi).
I also got alot out of
Karen Armstrong's books on religion - fascinating to me on all religions, but she goes through hindu and buddhist history in a few books (i find this slightly objective though sympathetic look at the history of religions valuable, as you usually only get the religion's dodgy version (or another religion/culture's hate-version)
) - any vids/books you recommend?
