PROUD OF BEING AN INDIAN...BUT WHERE HAS ALL THIS GLORY GONE??? Read through below to know a few contributions (due to paucity of space) of ancient Indians!! Inventors of ALGEBRA and GEOMETRY: Besides the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion, the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our biological and theologians seem dwarfed! Name of us any modern discovery, and we venture to say that Indian history need not long be searched before the prototype will be found on record. Here we are with the transit of science half accomplished, and all our Vedic ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehension, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ: The first germ of life was developed by water and heat. (Manusmriti - Book I, sloka 8,9) - Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890) GRAVITATION: Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center. Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together. The Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians of the fifth century A.D. calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in 19th century England were convinced it was 100 million years. - Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick Teresi SPHERICITY OF EARTH: The existence of rather advanced concepts like the sphericity of Earth and the cause of seasons is quite clear in Vedic literature. For example, the Aitareya Brahmana (3.44) declares: “The Sun does never set nor rise. When people think the Sun is setting (it is not so). For after having arrived at the end of the day it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making night to what is below and day to what is on the other side…Having reached the end of the night, it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making day to what is below and night to what is on the other side. In fact, the Sun never sets….” SPEED of LIGHT: One such book is the celebrated commentary on the Rig Veda by Sayana (c. 1315-1387), a minister in the court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India. In his commentary on the 4th verse of the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says: Tatha cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti Thus it is remembered: O Sun, bow to you, you who traverse 2,202 yojanas in half a minute. The Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9 miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second. Sayana’s statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the big bang. (source: The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak p. 75 - 77). MATHEMATICS: INVENTORS OF ZERO. Indians of pre-modern history calculated the age of the universe in trillions of years. This is also the culture that gave us zero, the numerals that we use – so-called Arabic have their roots in India – as do trigonometry and calculus, astronomical calculation and a view that says the universe is not only billions, but trillions of years in age and that we are eternal beings who are simply visiting the material world to have the experience of being here. There is a lot of evidence that ancient Indian civilization was global and as I mentioned many were seafaring and using extremely accurate astronomical, heliocentric calculations for both Earth and celestial motions, indicating an understanding that the Sun is at the center of the solar system and that the Earth is round. Elliptical orbits were also calculated for all moving celestial bodies. The findings are remarkable. What India calculated thousands of years ago, for example the wobble of the Earths axis, which creates the movement called precession of the equinoxes – the slowly changing motion that completes one cycle every 25,920 years – has only recently been validated by modern science. - Jeffrey Armstrong on the Mysteries of Indian Culture, the Relevance of Hindu Vedas and the Reality of Ancient Flying Machines. ATOMIC THEORY: In the realm of physics, remarkable contributions have been made by Indian scientists. Kanada, the founder of the Vaisesika system of philosophy, expounded that the entire matter in this world consists of atoms as many in kind as the various elements. Kanadas atom would then correspond to the modern atom. Some Jain thinkers went a step further. They thought that all atoms are the same kind and variety emerged because they entered into different combinations. Kanada taught that light and heat are variations of the same reality. Vacaspati interpreted light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances and striking the eyes. This is a clear anticipation of the corpuscular theory of light, which was proposed by Newton but rejected till the discovery of the proton. (source: Hinduism and Scientific Quest - By T R. R. Iyengar p. 153-154 South Asia Books ASIN 8124600775). UNIVERSAL TIME SCALE: The late scientist, Carl Sagan, in his book, Cosmos asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of. Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter. The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. (source: Cosmos - By Carl Sagan Random House ISBN 0375508325 p. 213 -214).
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 09:00:32 +0000
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