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Who remembers ancient India's scientific wealth?

Who remembers ancient India's scientific wealth?

Author: Md. Vazeeruddin
Publication: Asian Tribune
Date: January 26, 2006
URL: http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=2978

Sessions of Indian Science Congress are held with monotonous regularity at fixed periodicity. Eminent persons use them to think aloud on what breakthroughs India needs to achieve. For instance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just told such a session that India should aim at a second Green Revolution. That was a laudable sentiment. But is it not the duty of the notables to use such sessions to tell the masses what ancient India had achieved in the field of science?

Is Indian heritage only spiritual and cultural, and not scientific? On the contrary, it is at least as scientific as it is spiritual or cultural. It is, however, true that any claim that India's scientific heritage is as great as its spiritual and cultural heritage may baffle many Indians because we have for decades, if not centuries, believed that science is the West's contribution to humanity while India made the world aware of, and prize, cultural and moral values.

That is the reason why we talk day in and day out of our spiritual and cultural heritage but seldom, if ever, of our scientific heritage. Do we have any? Not many know the true answer. In the book "Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham", edited by Mikulas Teich and Robert Young, Dr Rahman, "speaking for India", convincingly exploded the myth that science and technology were essentially European.

The Director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies called for co-ordination among various agencies for the allocation of funds for the promotion of research into the history and philosophy of science in India.

Inaugurating in Delhi a meeting of experts on "approach and logistics of supporting research into history and philosophy in India", Dr Ashok Jain said that critical studies in the historical and philosophical contexts of science and technology were vital for the sustenance of an innovative tradition. Research in this area is not only of cultural and academic significance but is responsible also for bringing to life the "foundational aspect of science" which is vital for the development of theoretical science.

Unfortunately, a meeting, jointly organized by the Institute and the National Commission on History and Philosophy of Science, went more or less unnoticed by the public; understandably because the view is gaining ever-increasing acceptance that interest in the history of science is a sign of failing powers. Mercifully, however, medical practitioners who are usually enthralled by the history of medicine do not hold this low opinion. The possible reason is that physicians and surgeons, like all who are executants rather than theorists, are great hero-worshippers, and hero-worship is a great incentive to the study of historical records.

What, anyway, is the Indian science whose history needs to be known? Take, for instance, zinc. Europe learnt to produce it in 1746, but it was distilled in India more than 2,000 years ago through the use of a highly sophisticated pyro-technology. Distillation of this metal in India was brought to light through a series of nearly intact structural remains of ancient Indian zinc distillation furnaces at Zawar near Udaipur in Rajasthan. In late 17th century zinc was imported in small quantities from the East and used in the production of brass. After all, before the advent of present-day high-pressure technology, zinc had inevitably to be produced as a vapour because of the vast difficulties in its distillation process at Bristol in Britain in 1747. The discoveries at Zawar nevertheless prove that Indians knew the process some 2,000 years ago.

Or consider astronomy. According to Dr B.G.Sidhartha, Director of the B.M. Birla Planetarium at Hyderabad, Rig Vedic authors had already discovered the spherecity of the Earth and established the heliocentric (Sun-cantered) theory much before Copernicus. The Rig Veda, according to him, is the oldest textbook on modern astronomy. As such, its seers were scientists in the modern sense. Yet they deliberately concealed this knowledge in hymns, probably because the subject was the preserve of priests. In the hymns themselves, however, can be found through new interpretations the information that light is composed of seven colours, a discovery attributed by modern science to Newton. Thus, when Indra lets loose his seven rivers, it means the splitting of sunlight. Therefore, the rainbow is called "Indradhanush" in the Atharveda.

Three ancient astronomers, the "Ribhus", were the first to establish that the Earth was round and that Mercury and Venus revolved round the Sun. But these sacred texts came down from father to son and thus lost their form and structure till they were lost by about 1400 B.C.

The computer is the reigning fad today and, therefore, India's scientific achievements of the past, some argue, pale into insignificance. But were our ancient scientists totally ignorant of what has developed into the computer? Aryabhata, the ancient Indian mathematician, it is true, had no computer, but some of the techniques that he developed were precisely the ones used in solving problems with today's computer. What is more, computer designers in the West are now studying the works of ancient Indian mathematicians to learn a thing or two about writing software. Aryabhata's algorithm, called "kuttaka" and meant to solve linear intermediate equations, has been found by the West to be extremely efficient computationally. Similarly, the method of Brahmagouta, Jayadeva and Bhaskara-II (rediscovered in Europe 1000 years later) was "optimum in minimizing the number of steps for solving a problem".

Dr Rick Briggs, an American computer engineer, in a paper published in the 1985 issue of "Artificial Intelligence", said that ancient Indians had developed a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit "in a manner that is identical not only in essence but also in form with the current work of artificial intelligence". According to him, "Sanskrit grammarians had already found a way of solving what is perhaps the most important problem in computer science-natural language understanding and machine translation".

Now take physics. Dr Erwin Schrodinger, in an essay, "Seek For The Road", written in 1925, said that science, like Vedantic philosophy, used analogy to comprehend phenomena, as logic had its own limitations and left the scientist in the lurch after taking him up to a certain point. Dr Schrodinger, who won the Nobel Prize for his wave equation that placed the revolutionary quantum concept (as opposed to the Newtonian mechanistic interpretation) on a firm scientific basis, found support for Vedanta in the new physics with its element of indeterminism and idea of "collapse of the wave function", mathematical entity to describe nature for no discernible physical reason.

The most important link between science and the Sastras is an uncompromising logical attitude to everything. According to Prof. T.S.Shankara, who took up "sanyas" and became Swami Parmananda Bharati after teaching physics for 15 years in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai, some basic concepts of modern-day physics are found in the Sastras. For example, the concept of relativity is to be found in them. Basic ideas of relative velocity (velocity not being absolute but only relative) are extensively referred to by Shankaracharya, quoting the Vedas. The Brahmashastras contain a profound discussion on the same subject. According to Swamiji, "if only some of our students had known this, one of them could have developed Einstein's theory of relativity much before it was done. Pithy statements in the Sastras can help our scientists make significant contributions".

Or consider what the eminent nuclear physicist D.S.Kothari has to say. In a prestigious lecture on "Science and Values" delivered at the Indian National Science Academy on the concluding day of its golden jubilee celebrations, he claimed that the view of the universe provided by physics proclaimed the moral insight of philosophy. "Plank's constant, which explains movement of electrons at various levels of energy, does lead to the moral conclusion that in practicing truth lies immortality as stated in the Rig Veda," he explained. "Plank's constant has a message that either we hang together or will be destroyed together," he said, and referred to the Rig Vedic invocation to the Sun that stressed the wisdom of practicing truth. How can we lament lack of national pride in Indians without first acquainting them with the country's phenomenal scientific achievements in the dim distant past?


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