From: "Ashok Chowgule" Subject: Why Indian science scores Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 09:55:50 +0530 Why Indian science scores Author: Shashi Tharoor Publication: The Hindu Date: June 8, 2003 URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003060800310300.htm Working, as I have been for the last couple of years, on a short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists. He made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers' money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world. Jawaharlal's establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology (and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) have produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the U.S. as one from MIT or Caltech, and India's extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West. And yet the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. I was reminded of this yet again by a remarkable new book, Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi. Teresi's book studies the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science, and while he ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians and other Africans, it is his references to India that caught my eye. And how astonishing those are! The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together 24 centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. 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. If I were to focus on just one field in this column, it would be that of mathematics. 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. ("In the history of culture," wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, "the invention of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.") The concept of infinite sets of rational numbers was understood by Jain thinkers in the Sixth Century B.C. Our forefathers can take credit for geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; the "Bakhshali manuscript", 70 leaves of bark dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era, reveals fractions, simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, geometric progressions and even calculations of profit and loss, with interest. Indian mathematicians invented negative numbers: the British mathematician Lancelot Hogben, grudgingly acknowledging this, suggested ungraciously that "perhaps because the Hindus were in debt more often than not, it occurred to them that it would also be useful to have a number which represent the amount of money one owes". (That theory would no doubt also explain why Indians were the first to understand how to add, multiply and subtract from zero - because zero was all, in Western eyes, we ever had.) The Sulba Sutras, composed between 800 and 500 B.C., demonstrate that India had Pythagoras' theorem before the great Greek was born, and a way of getting the square root of 2 correct to five decimal places. (Vedic Indians solved square roots in order to build sacrificial altars of the proper size.) The Kerala mathematician Nilakantha wrote sophisticated explanations of the irrationality of "pi" before the West had heard of the concept. The Vedanga Jyotisha, written around 500 B.C., declares: "Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on the head of a snake, so is mathematics at the head of all knowledge." Our mathematicians were poets too! But one could go back even earlier, to the Harappan civilisation, for evidence of a highly sophisticated system of weights and measures in use around 3000 B.C. Archaeologists also found a "ruler" made with lines drawn precisely 6.7 millimeters apart with an astonishing level of accuracy. The "Indus inch" was a measure in consistent use throughout the area. The Harappans also invented kiln-fired bricks, less permeable to rain and floodwater than the mud bricks used by other civilisations of the time. The bricks contained no straw or other binding material and so turned out to be usable 5, 000 years later when a British contractor dug them up to construct a railway line between Multan and Lahore. And while they were made in 15 different sizes, the Harappan bricks were amazingly consistent: their length, width and thickness were invariably in the ratio of 4:2:1. "Indian mathematical innovations," writes Teresi, "had a profound effect on neighbouring cultures." The greatest impact was on Islamic culture, which borrowed heavily from Indian numerals, trigonometry and analemma. Indian numbers probably arrived in the Arab world in 773 A.D. with the diplomatic mission sent by the Hindu ruler of Sind to the court of the Caliph al-Mansur. This gave rise to the famous arithmetical text of al-Khwarizmi, written around 820 A.D., which contains a detailed exposition of Indian mathematics, in particular the usefulness of the zero. With Islamic civilisation's rise and spread, knowledge of Indian mathematics reached as far afield as Central Asia, North Africa and Spain. "In serving as a conduit for incoming ideas and a catalyst for influencing others," Teresi adds, "India played a pivotal role." His research is such a rich lode that I intend to return to ancient Indian science in a future column. Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the author of seven books, most recently Riot and (with M.F. Husain) Kerala: God's Own Country. From: "vrnparker" Mailing-List: list vediculture@yahoogroups.com Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:49:22 -0000 Subject: [world-vedic] The Things India Knew First The things India knew first By Shashi Tharoor United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information. IN an earlier column I wrote of how the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. I cited a remarkable new book, Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi, which studies the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science. While Teresi ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians and other Africans, it is his references to India that won me. Where my previous piece focused on ancient India's remarkable breakthroughs in mathematics, in this column I'd like to cover the other sciences in which our ancestors excelled. For a nation still obsessed by astrology, it is ironic that Indians established the field of planetary astronomy, identifying the relative distance of the known planets from the sun, and figured out that the moon was nearer to the earth than the sun. A hymn of the Rig-Veda extols "nakshatra-vidya"; the Vedas' awareness of the importance of the sun and the stars is manifest in several places. The Siddhantas are amongst the world's earliest texts on astronomy and mathematics; the Surya Siddhanta, written about 400 A.D., includes a method for finding the times of planetary ascensions and eclipses. The notion of gravitation, or gurutvakarshan, is found in these early texts. "Two hundred years before Pythagoras," writes Teresi, "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 centre." The Kerala-born genius 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. (His ideas were so far in advance of his time that many later editors of his awe-inspiring "Aryabhatiya" altered the text to save his reputation from what they thought were serious errors.) Aryabhata conceived of the elliptical orbits of the planets a thousand years before Kepler, in the West, came to the same conclusion (having assumed, like all Europeans, that planetary orbits were circular rather than elliptical). He even estimated the value of the year at 365 days, six hours, 12 minutes and 30 seconds; in this he was only a few minutes off (the correct figure is just under 365 days and six hours). 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. If Aryabhata was a giant of world science, his successors as the great Indian astronomers, Varamahira and Brahmagupta, have left behind vitally important texts that space does not allow me to summarise here. The mathematical excellence of Indian science, which I described in a recent column, sparkles through their work; Indian astronomers advanced their field by calculations rather than deductions from nature. Teresi says that "Indian astronomy, perhaps more than any other, has served as the crossroads and catalyst between the past and the future of the science." Inevitably, Indian cosmology was also in advance of the rest of the world. By the Fifth Century A.D. Indians became the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than four billion years. Teresi's book has a fascinating section relating Hindu creation myths to modern cosmology; he discusses the notion of great intermeshing cycles of creation and destruction and draws stimulating parallels with the "big bang" theory that currently commands the field. The ancient Indians were no slouches in chemistry, which emerges in several verses of the Atharva Veda, composed around 1000 B.C. Two thousand years later, Indian practical chemistry was still more advanced than Europe's. The historian Will Durant wrote that the Vedic Indians were "ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry; they were masters of calcination, distillation, sublimation, steaming, fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of anaesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic salts, compounds and alloys." An Indian researcher, Udayana, studied gases by filling bladders and balloons with smoke, air and assorted gases. The ancient Jain thinkers predicted the notion of opposite electrical charges and advanced a notion of the "spin" of particles which would not be discovered by the West till the 20th Century. So what about physics? Indian metaphysicists came upon the idea of atoms centuries before the Greek Democritus, known in the West as the father of particle physics. In 600 B.C. Kannada established a theory of atoms in his Vaisesika-sutra; the Jains went further in later years, expounding a concept of elementary particles. Indians also came closer to quantum physics and other current theories than anyone else in the ancient world. The Upanishadic concepts of svabhava - the inherent nature of material objects - and yadrchha (the randomness of causality) are startlingly modern. The Upanishads developed the first classifications of matter, evolving into an awareness of the five elements and later of the five senses. When the Samkhya philosophers explained, in the Sixth Century B.C., that "the material universe emanates out of prakriti, the rootless root of the universe," they anticipate Aristotle. And when Indian philosophers spoke of maya, or that which gives illusory weight to the universe, they did so in terms that evoke the 20th Century idea of the Higgs field, the all-pervasive invisible field so beloved of particle physicists, which gives substance to illusion. Which brings us back to technology. Did India have any technology of its own before the IITs? The answer is an emphatic yes. I have already mentioned last time the extraordinary achievements of the Harappan civilization, which included terra cotta ceramics fired at high temperatures, a sophisticated system of weights and measures, and sanitary engineering skills in advance of the West of the 19th Century. Our skill at digging up, cutting and polishing diamonds goes back millennia. In the Sixth Century A.D. India made the highest- quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest products with skilled labour. That was, in the end, how the British defeated us. http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/stories/2003072000120300.htm Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information. Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:19:11 -0000 Subject: [world-vedic] Re:The things Indians knew first Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com --- In indicjournalists@yahoogroups.com, "N.S. Rajaram" wrote: Actually, Tharoor's column doesn't do full justice to ancient Indian achievements and also drags the dates to the colonial-missionary chronology, assigning the Atharvaveda to 1000 BC, and by implication the Rigveda to 1200 BC. he also fails to note the achievements in the Sulbasutras (Vedic mathematics), metallurgy and others. So he essentially is extolling what people like Basham and the secularists following him have been doing - damning with faint praise. But I don't think Tharoor has an ulterior agenda, only uninformed. NSR