Who remembers ancient India’s scientific wealth?

[Guest guest]

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? - Syndicate Features -

http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=2978Do

You ?