India's contribution to modern science

I usually steer away from the flavor of the month science related books that throw up some or the other interesting discovery – only to have them contradicted in next month’s release (Michael Hanlon has an interesting take on this subject and blogger Sandy blows the lid off certain such ‘studies’ in her blog).

There are however some books that are a welcome break from this trend, if not for the durability of their scientific rigor at least for their ability to realize, that they do not, in fact, have all the answers. These are the books that question entrenched mindsets but do so with the politeness, carefulness and smartness of someone who knows the bounds of his or her own knowledge. Dick Teresi’s Lost Discoveries is just such a book.

Through this book the author tries to single handedly restore to the many (often faceless) Indian, Mayan, Chinese, Arab and Babylonian scientists the credit that rightfully belonged to them but which, through the caprices of fate and the avarice of men, had eluded them over the ages. It is a lofty ambition; while I’ll let readers decide whether or not he is successful in this endeavor, his research brings to light some (that were to me) unknown and intriguing facts about the science that existed in our own country.

Here is a sampling:
#Two hundred years before Pythagoras, 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 center.

#Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together

#The Sanskrit-speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one.

#The Indians of the fifth century A.D. somehow calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in nineteenth-century England were convinced it was 100 million years. (The modern estimate is 4.6 billion years.)

#Indians between 800 and 500 B.C. had their own version of the Pythagorean theorem as well as a procedure for obtaining the square root of 2 correct to five decimal places.

#Indian mathematical innovations had a profound effect on neighboring cultures. Trigonometry and analemma (a system of ways to reduce problems in three dimensions to a plane), for instance, greatly influenced Islamic astronomy and its heirs in western Europe.

#Aryabhata conceptualized the orbits of the planets as ellipses, a thousand years before Kepler reluctantly (he originally preferred circles) came to the same conclusion.

#Indian theorists posited that atoms combine to form aggregates, which then make up all manifestations of physical matter. The Jainist atom came in two opposing kinds—"snighda, positive or soft, and ruksha, negative or rough"—which combined, an idea foreshadowing the modern idea of ionic bonding.

Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya can be found here: http://rapidshare.com/files/68983411/120501003.rar
Or for those of you who do not like to feel ‘ethically impugned’ here: Amazon.com