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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.
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.