Were Our Ancient Ancestors Scientifically Advanced?

J V Narlikar

[This essay, written by the eminent Cosmologist Jayant V Narlikar, first appeared in the April 1985 issue of Science Age, a magazine now defunct, brought out by Nehru Centre, Bombay. Though the essay is almost three decades old, it continues to be as relevant as most of the criticisms on pseudoscience are.

While recommending books debunking pseudoscience,  MassimoPigliucci says in his influential book Nonsense on Stilts - How to Tell Science from Bunk that though the books he recommends are old, one need not worry as pseudoscience never progress. Since the purveyors of pseudoscience almost always recycle the same stale arguments, the criticism raised earlier also continues to be valid. This is true of promoters of pseudoscience in India as well - especially those who make outrageous claims about the so-called "Vedic Sciences"]

Dr Jayant V Narlikar
Image Courtesy:
http://scientistsinformation.blogspot.in/

“Astronomical Vedic Science” by J Arunachalam (Science Age, March 1985) tries to show that the Vedas contain extraordinary scientific knowledge.  Others believe our puranas contain descriptions of things which re scientific and technological inventions of the most sophisticated order.  Was Sanjay in the Mahabharata the first TV commentator?  Were the Kaurava princes test-tube babies?  Were the battles in our mythology fought with guided missiles? Was the Pushpak Viman a helicopter?  These are examples of technology.  But were our Vedic ancestors scientifically advanced?  Did they or their immediate successors employ high technology?  If you believe that the answers to these questions are n the affirmative, you must prove it with scientific evidence.

Let me clarify what I mean by scientific evidence.  For someone to argue that an apple falls down from an apple tree (when it ripens, say, and gets disconnected from the branch) because there is a force of gravity acting on it and pulling it towards the Earth, is not enough.  Not even Newton could have convinced his fellow scientists of the law of gravitation with just that observation.  The law of gravitation has behind it Kepler’s meticulous analysis of observations of planetary motion, Newton’s law of motion, the mathematics of calculus; it has following it such predictions as Halley’s Comet and the discovery of Neptune.  Science, in other words, is not a collection of vague qualitative statements: it rests upon detailed experiments and mathematical foundations.  What is technology?  It is not a folklore of extraordinary objects: it is made of detailed manuals specifying in minute details all the components that go to make such objects.  Scientific evidence should produce such detailed descriptions.

Take the Greek epicyclic theory.  Wrong though it turned out to be, it can be judged as a scientific theory even to day by examining, say, Ptolemy’s Almagest. Detailed geometrical constructions are given the aim of which was to reproduce the observed positions of planets on the sky and to predict where to find them in future. 

Mr Arunachalam complains that “a majority of Indian scientists who know a great deal of Greek science are thoroughly ignorant of Indian science”.  Since he talks of Vedic science, he presumably means that there exists Vedic science in such quantitative details as the above example of Greek science.  Unfortunately, to date, no such detailed description has emerged.

Science makes unambiguous statements based on precisely stated assumptions. Unfortunately, Sanskrit (a language which I know a little and admire a lot) is not a suitable medium for describing science.  It has flexibility of syntax and meaning that can lead to many interpretations being given to the same statement.  A classic example is Aryabhata’s sloka implying that the Earth revolves around an axis against a background of fixed stars.  Since at the time he made the statement, and in the centuries that followed, the geocentric theory held sway, Aryabhata’s successors interpreted this sloka differently.

This being the drawback of Sanskrit, statements in that language depend very much on who chooses to interpret them.  Scientific conclusions are by contrast objective.  When Einstein writes a paper it does not require different interpreters to say what he meant. If he wrote a paper in such ambiguous terms it would not be accepted for publication in any scientific journal.

Arunachalm’s examples from ancient writings are such that they depend very much on the interpreter.  Take for example his translation of the answer to where the Sun gets its energy: “the Sun gets its power from a gas, which is in unlimited quantity.”  Now if modern science had found the Kelvin-Helmholtz hypothesis of gravitational energy (of contractions) as the correct answer to solar energy, this statement could be cited in support of it.  This hypothesis is, however, incorrect and so the same statement could be cited (as Arunachalm presumably intends) as supporting thermonuclear energy.  Further, what does the adjective “unlimited” mean?  The Sun has a large but finite mass. Is this what is implied?  If so, the interpretations are contrived at best. The relationship of the time span of manvantara (300,000,000 years) to the modern estimate of the Sun’s orbital period round the Galaxy is equally farfetched unless the Sun’s motion round the Galaxy is so stated explicitly somewhere.

The Viman-shastra which I had once studied failed to satisfy me on either of the two counts.  In terms of science, it did not give (even qualitatively) the theory of aerodynamic lift that motivates all modern planes.  It did not give any alternative scientific explanation as to why planes fly.  An in terms of technology it did not give a manual on how to make a plane.

It is wrong to read “science” into descriptions that are not scientific texts in the first place. The Ramayana and Kumarasambhava are literary masterpieces. Let us not confuse them with such things as Principia Mathematica or Review of Modern Physics.  As for the Vedas, as Arunachalam says, “traditions hold that even to misspell a word by a single letter is sin” – that is hardly the spirit of science!  Had science followed such a tradition our school children or college graduates would today be reciting Alagest word for word.

In the end I wish to clarify that there have been scientific text in India. The Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas give medical science as known and understood and practiced in ancient India.  The works of Aryabhata and Bhaskara are examples of astronomy text which exhibit clarity (in spite of Sanskrit!).  Leelavatis is an excellent example of a text in arithmetic, algebra and geometry.  Thus it is not necessary to go to Western science per se for examples of ancient science writing.

This makes it all the more important to find scientifically written texts of Vedic times.  Until such text are found, I regret that my answers to questions in my title cannot be in the affirmative.

Posted in: Jayant Narlikar,Pseudoscience,Vedic Science,Vimana Sasthra