It is not necessary to debunk the genuine accomplishments of ancient Indian science in order to mock the laughable assertions of the Hindutva brigade. As I have been repeatedly saying, not everything from the government-sponsored right is necessarily wrong. A BJP government choosing to assert its pride in yoga and Ayurveda, and seeking to promote them internationally, is, to my mind, perfectly acceptable. Similarly, in asserting that ancient Indians anticipated Pythagoras, Dr Harsh Vardhan was not incorrect and should not have been ridiculed. In fact he could have added Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo as well, every single one of whom had been beaten to their famous discoveries by an unknown and unsung Indian centuries earlier. Aryabhata was the first human being to explain, in 499 A.D., that the daily rotation of the earth on its axis is what accounted for the daily rising and setting of the sun. Aryabhata conceived of the elliptical orbits of the planets a thousand years before Kepler, in the West, came to the same conclusion. The translation of the Aryabhatiya into Latin in the 13th Century taught Europeans a great deal; it also revealed to them that an Indian had known things that Europe would only learn of a millennium later. The Vedic civilisation subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat. By the Fifth Century A.D., Indians had calculated that the age of the earth was 4.3 billion years; as late as the 19th Century, English scientists believed the earth was a hundred million years old, and it is only in the late 20th Century that Western scientists have come to estimate the earth to be about 4.6 billion years old. India invented modern numerals (known to the world as Arabic numerals because the West got them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. Modern mathematics would have impossible without the zero and the decimal system; just read a string of Roman numbers, which had no zeros, to understand their limitations. --Dr. Shashi Tharoor ndtv/article/opinion/tharoor-explains-his-tweets-on-ancient-indian-science-644141?pfrom=home-topstories
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 15:02:27 +0000
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