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Ancient Planes and Other Claims Spark Controversy at Indian Science Congress
An anonymous reader writes A paper presented at the 102nd Indian Science Congress on Sunday claims that Indians had mastered aviation thousands of years before the Wright brothers. India's science and technology minister Mr. Harsh Vardhan who was present at the conference claimed that ancient Indian mathematicians discovered the Pythagorean theorem but that the Greeks got the credit. These startling claims come just a few days after prime minister Narendra Modi had called Lord Ganesha who is part elephant and part human, a product of ancient India's knowledge of plastic surgery.
Indian politics has a long history of using pseudo science to sway the gullible. Many years ago, we had a veteran politician getting farmers to agitate against dams claiming that the dams removed the electricity from the water, so when it reached the fields it did not have any electricity left. The lack of electricity was affecting the quality of the crops.
The creationist museum here in the US where I currently stay is the US version of the same thing. The use of "common sense" and "the written word of God" to counter empirical, evidence driven hard science.
The problem as I see it is that in the name of defending religion, we are required to unquestioningly suspend all argument and reason when reading religious texts. It is a very short step to suspend all argument and reason when listening to the people who hold themselves as defenders of these texts.
I'm just wondering if anyone has actually verified that "Mr. Harsh Vardhan" isn't actually Sacha Baron Cohen in disguise.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I made a heat transfer calculation webapp some years back for a undergrad research project. After the first several emails from Chinese and Indian grad students asking for my source code because it could help them with their own projects I stopped even bothering to read questions about the program.
So I have (ok had) a Russian friend. He's still a coworker, but I don't talk to him anymore.
He was talking to me, and since my background is a bit outside of the normal background for a programmer (did Biological research) he eventually guided me to a (didn't know it at the time) hoax finding in South America. I worked on the background information until I found out that not only was it a hoax, but in light of prosecution the perpetrator decided to recant and show how he manufactured the fake items.
His stance is that the recanting was done by coercion and that some of the items (which are now so popular you can buy them at the airport) are probably legitimate (admitting that some of them are probably fake as the man manufactured one for a television program).
I still can't follow his logic; but, it doesn't bode well for (what I assume is) the common Russian understanding of Science. Sure, their best is probably not subject to believing in a hoax after it is fully debunked; but, one would hope that a person trained in mathematics (computer science) would be a bit better than an ardent believer in an established hoax.
After mending hurt feelings, and making up with him, I eventually heard him ramble on about the recent Russian military action. He believes that the Russians were justified in invading; because, that country isn't really a country anyway, it's just Russian soil. He couldn't keep his temper while discussing it (and it quickly spilled over into some USA hatred).
Now I say "Hi" to him and make sure my path through the offices don't coincide with his for any length of time. Life is too short to get a bunch of bullshit lodged in your head.
If India hadn't developed nukes, Pakistan and China would have done major incursions into Indian territory by now. In fact the USA has indirectly helped Pakistan finance its nuke program over the years. if India had not developed nukes, Pakistan and China would have been in a position to completely invade and take over India any time they pleased. This would NOT have been a good thing for India, or the world, especially USA, because unlike India, the nations of Pakistan and China are not democracies. One is a country held to ransom by fanatic violent religious terrorists and the other is a crazy lying corrupt fascist pseudo-communist country.
So does the United States, a federation that believes in angels and that god is on its side, and which requires school children to recite a pledge of allegiance every day. Half the population doesn't even believe in evolution! ...and the best part is they have Nukes!
Maybe it depends on the state but we stopped reciting the pledge in Illinois sometime around Middle School (around '95 or a so.) Dunno how it is today.
Funny, but if I recall the original water fluoridation conspiracies came from John Bircher types who said it was a plot by Communists to mind-control Americans. And I think you'll find many anti-vaxers & anti GMO people these days are Conservative homeschool sorts.
Indeed, a lot of weird things exist in India.
- Regions with really high radioactive background but with no compelling natural explanation. Ruins of ancient castles where the stone walls have thoroughly melted as if glass, at temperatures most likely higher than termite or oxy-acetylene
- Rather detailed descriptions of tactical nuclear warfare in the vedas, including fallout and decontamination activity.
- Descriptions of giant arrow throwers, which protect aginst vimanas or flying war chariots, but are so complex no less than 4 people in close cooperation can operate them.
(Those passages bear eerie similarity to the SA-2 missiles that downed B-52s over Hanoi: they were so complex at least 4-5 people were needed to guide them. This was NOT because of the low level of automation-computerization available to the soviets, as it has been proven over and over that higher automated systems, e.g. BUK, TOR can be jammed deterministically by advanced enough pods. In contrast, man in the loop systems, like the SA-3 remain efficient after over 40 years in service and earthed an F-16, F-117 in 1999 and a jewish AGM-142 flying bomb a few weeks ago.)
- There is a long-running rumor among the jews (the gem trading race) that those fabulous giant diamonds found nowhere else but India are artificial, rather than of natural origin. Many millenia ago, there was some advanced civilization in the Indus valley, who could make fist sized diamonds. We are decades, if not centuries from that level of sophistication.
- Hinduism is the only major religion that never felt the need to exterminate the faith of her neighbours or the neighbours themselves. India is spiritually more advanced, maybe because they have already have their many major wars many millenia ago, thus having learnt what we learned only in WWI and WW2. (May I mention stories about the legendary King Ashoka and the secret anti-war society of the Nine Unknown Men, he founded?)
- If you watch the recent prequel of Alien movie, the extraterrestrial "engineer" is seen reading ancient sanskrit there (tale of the horse and lamb or something like that). I think there is a deep-running understanding in the graeco-roman heritage that white people culture and the large majority of european languages can from northern India, the so-called aryans.
There is a strong vein of Hindu nationalism which intrudes on a number of fields. One particular area of research where this sort of Hindu jingoism pops in is in Indo-European linguistics. While the overwhelming majority of researchers into Proto-Indo-European believe the PIE urheimat is either in Eastern Europe or possibly Anatolia, there are a number of Indian linguists who insist, despite every evidence that the Indo-Iranian languages arrived relatively late in the subcontinent, that Proto-Indo-European's origins are in or near India.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I work in a field in which Hindutva fundamentalists are a prominent presence. Papers making the same claims of early Indian aviation and advanced weaponry, published by actual faculty at Indian universities, are a common sight.