Originally posted by FMF
If, as you claim, "no one worked it out", who "presented" these "figures" and where did the "figures" come from?
[b]you have to realize that when light travels through the cosmos it can travel at different speeds according to the circumstances.
And you're saying the Vedas were unable to come to terms with this?[/b]
Imagine that archaeologists, digging a thousand year old virgin site in
Antarctica, come across an inscription deep underground that shows the
sun, and next to it the numbers 186,000 miles per second, the speed of
light. What would the world do? More likely than not, this find will
not be accepted by scholars. A fraud, they would say, committed for
cheap fame. The reputation of the archaeologists will be ruined. If
they didn't hold tenure, they will lose their jobs.
Only lunatics will support them, claiming that this proves that aliens
have visited the earth from time to time. The high priests of the
academy will say that even if the find was genuine it proves nothing;
at best it is a coincidence.
But what an astonishing coincidence! Just the right number out of an
infinite different numbers!
The speed of light was first determined in 1675 by Roemer who looked at
the difference in the times that light from Io, one of the moons of
Jupiter, takes to reach earth based on whether it is on the near side
of Jupiter or the far side. Until then light was taken to travel with
infinite velocity. Even Newton assumed so.
But why are we talking about the absurd scenario of the archaeologists
in Antarctica? Because, we are confronted with a situation that is
quite similar!
I am an archaeologist of texts. I read old texts from the point of view
of history of science. One such book is the celebrated commentary on
the Rigveda by Sayana (c. 1315-1387), a minister in the court of King
Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India.
In a hymn addressed to the sun, he says that it is ``remembered that
the sun traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesha.''
This statement could either relate to the speed of the sun or to that
of light. The units are well known. For example, the Indian epic
``Mahabharata", conservatively dated to 400 BC - 400 AD, defines 1
nimesha to be equal to 16/75.3 seconds; 1 yojana is about 9 miles.
Substituting in Sayana's statement we get 186,536 miles per second.
Unbelievable, you'd say! It cannot be the speed of light. Maybe it
refers to the speed of the sun in its supposed orbit around the earth.
But that places the orbit of the sun at a distance of over 2,550
million miles. The correct value is only 93 million miles and until
the time of Roemer the distance to the sun used to be taken to be less
than 4 million miles. This interpretation takes us nowhere.
What about the possibility of fraud? Sayana's statement was printed in
1890 in the famous edition of Rigveda 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 Roemer.
Is it possible that Muller was duped by an Indian correspondent who
slipped in the line about the speed? Unlikely, because Sayana's
commentary is so well known that an interpolation would have
been long discovered. And soon after Muller's ``Rigveda'' was
published, someone would have claimed that it contained this
particular ``secret''knowledge. The fact that the speed in the text
corresponds to the speed of light was pointed out only recently
by S.S. De and P.V. Vartak. Also a copy of Sayana's manuscript,
dated 1395 AD, is available.
Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book
comes from another old book, the Vayu Purana. This is one of the
earliest Puranas, considered to be at least 1,500 years old.
(The same reference is to be found in the other Puranas as well.)
In Chapter 50 of this book, there is the statement that the sun moves
3.15 million yojanas in 48 minutes. This corresponds to about 10,000
miles per second if considered as speed of light, and 135 million miles
for the distance to the sun, if considered as the speed of the sun.
Sayana's speed of light is exactly 18 times greater than this
speed of the sun! Mere numerology?
We must also not forget that 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.
For the rationalists these numbers are a coincidence. Given the
significance of these numbers, they'd look very carefully at the old
manuscripts of Sayana's commentary.
There are others who would say that consciousness, acting on itself can
find universal knowledge. Look, they'd say, by examining biological
cycles one can know the periods of the sun and the moon. So why
shouldn't it be possible to know other universal truths?
They'd add that ancient texts speak -- and this is true -- of embryo
transplants, multiple births from the same fetus, air and space travel,
slowing or speeding of time, weapons that can destroy the entire world.
They'd say that it is more than ancient science fiction, it shows that
the human imagination can envision all that can happen.
This brings us back to the question of whether the figure of 186,000
miles per second in Sayana's book is a astonishing coincidence,
an example of the powers of intuition, or a meaningless number.
What do you think?
Notes:
1. The Rigvedic hymn number is 1.50.
2. For a discussion of the technical issues download the
file speedlight.ps from the ftp directory on my homepage or
see http://www.ee.lsu.edu/kak/ and then check the
file speedlight.ps
You can also read this paper called ``The speed of light and
Puranic cosmology'' on the Los Alamos Physics Archive
physics/9804020.
23 Feb '11 06:35
Vedic knowledge at the foundation of modern science
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