I’m quite certain that if any ancient society had nuclear weapons, the Earth would be a lot more radioactive than it is currently.
but i heard the great western scientisits einstein and newton were frauds that stole from indian physicists like Bose and the ancient Vedics
Where did you hear this?
You heard wrong.
Guys, we’re going about this all wrong! The Nazis used Swastikas! It wasn’t cultural appropriation or a really stupid use of an old symbol. No, it was a coded sign that our physicists were plagiarising from Indian texts!
Next you’re going to tell me sanskrit isn’t the most nearly perfect language for programming.
I do like his speakers.
Where? From whom?
Newton is famously quoted as saying “If I have seen farther it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants”. He fully realized his achievements built upon those who came before him.
OTOH that’s a long way from “stole from physicists like the ancient Vedics”… Like Miller said, even if any such knowledge of higher theoretical physics existed it was never known to the West, they had to figure it out from what of chemistry, optics and algebra they got from the East via the Muslims.
It is perfectly plausible that Indian and Chinese thinkers could have come up with advanced scientific ideas for any given time – until the Western Renaissance, India and China *were *often superior in technology and scientific scholarship in any given period, and scientists in both have always been top rank (if allowed academic freedom). But that any ancient science/math was *superior *to modern? To conclude that we’d need to see and compare the books, the formulations of laws/theories, the equations, and put them to scientific test.
I understand that…but why does Newton get credit for gravity if Ancient Indians did it before him… unless he used a more succesful/better method in achieving it
Because they didn’t. Everyone knew things fell down, Newton came up with reasons why and the laws of motion. Others would have done so if he hadn’t, but the Ancient Indians hadn’t.
Why don’t you provide the source of your ideas? Because otherwise we’re trying to debate empty air.
Assuming that is true (the “Ancient Indians” part), the reason why Newton gets credit while the unnamed physicists don’t is simple: From Newton, much of the rest of the modern world followed. From the Ancient Indian Physicists, nothing followed from their discoveries.
Can’t speak for the OP, but this is the first place I heard it:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17177030&postcount=1
Because AFAIK, nowhere is there recorded evidence of a source of ancient Indian equations for gravity, featuring the inverse-square effect of distance and the direct proportion of the product of masses, tied by a gravitational constant. Or even a treatise on how gravitational acceleration at the surface of Earth is uniform and equal for all objects. Plus like someone else said, the observation that things fall does not constitute by itself a scientific discovery.
I’m just reading Dan Brown’s sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Lost Symbol.” The poor deluded son of a badger actually tries to claim that the ten circles of mystical kabbalism pre-figure the ten-dimensions of modern String Theory.
One of the stupidest damn claims anyone has ever made. Brown can write a page-turning thriller, but his knowledge of science is obviously faulty. (Like Pol Pot’s moral sense or Mother Theresa’s prowess at pro-wrestling.)
Bhaskara II
Bhāskara’s work on calculus predates Newton and Leibniz by over half a millennium.[5][6] He is particularly known in the discovery of the principles of differential calculus and its application to astronomical problems and computations. While Newton and Leibniz have been credited with differential and integral calculus, there is strong evidence to suggest that Bhāskara was a pioneer in some of the principles of differential calculus. He was perhaps the first to conceive the differential coefficient and differential calculus.[7]
The history of calculus is long and had many contributors. The work in India built off the work out of Greece and later in the Middle East. There were many important contributions out of India but they never brought all the pieces togehter. Lots of people developed the concepts that were brought together by Newton and Leibniz.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the nature of science that many of the contributors get downplayed while the synthesizer becomes well known.
They didn’t.
Read a little farther down your own reference:
Hardly a claim of outdoing Newton.
Indeed. Evidence of pioneering but not of “superiority”. Shoulders of giants again.
It is just not uncommon for the figures who took the first or second key steps to get forgotten because someone further down the road took the step that the masses noticed.
People remember Edison or or Ford or Columbus even though they were not the “real first one” or the original theoretician, because they were the ones who impacted the mainstream’s lives more visibly. Same happens in higher physics and maths. Only that Newton and Einstein WERE great theoreticians themselves, who drew major conclusions and came up with extraordinary next steps from those.
There are lot of Rightie Nutsin India, spewing BS like this.
Some of these articles challenge even NASA.
Here is a maths professor debunkingso called Vedic maths. (PDF file)