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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.