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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.
...and the best part is they have Nukes!
Of making dense posts in the Internet and in technical forums. I have left too many technical forums because there is no patience for the multitude of posts "I don't know how to this simple task, poor of me, do my job for me"
Elephant in the room...
lord ganesha proof of plastic surgery?? rarely do i found abject ignorance so funny. but this is gold!!
The greeks got the credit, but lost them some years ago due to economic difficulties. The common wisdom now is that the Pythagorean theorem have been discovered by an anonymous hedge fund.
And the ancient planes also had the ability to fly between planets too. Don't think that these claims will stand up to review.
Ancient peoples were just as smart as us, but you need time to build the necessary tech. base in order to make advanced equipment so that you can discover advanced scientific theories and engineering disciplines.
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.
... but I guess a paper entitled "Indians Invented Nothing" might not be selected for presentation.
...the Indian "Science" Conference ?
Master Yoda? Is that you?
Well, documentation is legendary in Indian code.
The inventions were obviously self documenting
The evil white colonial devil must have MADE them forget, obviously!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's also proven that ancient people mastered the art of wireless communication. The lack of wire traces is definite proof.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
so, after kim jong il died his science advisor was hired by the indians
so, what's next ? unicorns or yeti's ?
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
I mean other countries had president which believed in an apocalyptic religion (revelation) or that atheist should not given the right to vote. Being from outside, the apocalyptic believer make me far more fear than the plane-to-other-planet Veda believer.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No, they had long since pulled up the copper and replaced it with glass fiber, which has since turned back to sand.
Nearly every comment on this article deviates from 'really bad peer reviews' into racist bigotry. Shame on you lot.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
...they're going to dig for copper cabling that's thousands of years old,
I have some Verizon cables in my neighborhood that seem like they might qualify.
The British royal family. They all live in the same family house together - Indian. All work in the family business - Indian. All have arranged marriages - Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good - Indian. Children live with their parents until they are married - Indian!
Except Prince Charles. He's African.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
this reminds me of a joke...
scientists around the world were trying to figure out which was the most advanced in the past
so, the french dig a deep hole and found some copper string, and claimed that they had invented the telephone 1000 years ago
the english dug an even deeper hole and found some glass shards, and claimed that they had invented fiberglass wires 2000 years ago
the portuguese dug an absurdly deep hole, and found NOTHING
so they claimed that they invented wireless cellphone 6000 years ago
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
...some bad India jokes:
I'm Gonna Jump
In Mumbai, a man is going to jump off the building.
Up rushes good Hindu cop to talk him down.
Cop yells up to the man "Don't jump! Think of your father" Man replies "Haven't got a father; I'm going to jump."
The cop goes through a list of relatives, mother, brothers, sister, etc. Each time man says "haven't got one; going to jump."
Desperate the cop yells up "Don't jump! Think of Lord Krishna"
Man replies "Who is that?"
Cop yells "Jump, Muslim! You're blocking traffic!"
Two Accountants
One day two accountants, who were best friends, were walking together down the street.
One was a Hindu and constantly berated the other for eating meat!
After stopping for a hot dog, the Hindu erupted "Why do you eat meat?, Do you even know what's in that hot dog? You know, you are what you eat!"
The American replied "I am what I eat, an uncontrollable vicious animal (beating his chest)"
As they stepped off the curb a speeding car came around the corner and ran the Hindu over.
The American called 911 and helped his injured friend as best he was able.
The injured Hindu was taken to emergency at the hospital and rushed into surgery. After a long and agonizing wait, the doctor finally appeared.
He told the uninjured American, "I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is that your friend is going to pull through."
"The bad news is that he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life."
Currency Exchange
A hindu man walked into the currency exchange in New York City with 5000 rupees and walked out with $100.
The following week, he walked in with another 5000 rupees, and was handed $84.
He asked the teller why he got less money that week than the previous week. The teller said, "Fluctuations."
The hindu man stormed out, and just before slamming the door, turned around and shouted, "Fluc you Amelicans, too!"
They had to discontinue use of the mobile version, though. Turns out signal fires kept in the pocket or held to one's ear emit harmful radiation.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I was wondering when NC would stop promoting cowardice on its license plates.
Idiocy spans all political parties, countries, religions, scientific circles and humanity as a whole. One man's genius is another man's idiot. And today's genius may find that they are tomorrow's idiot and vice-versa.
But I would argue that much of the problem is with the name calling (or idiot calling in this case) as much as anything else. When we wage our intellectual battles by calling each other names meant to degrade and or trivialize, we are just as much of an "idiot" as those who seek to harm.
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.
Until you have read him in the original Hindi.
To some degree, I can accept "lost technology." A claim that the Indians had some metallurgical technique that was lost and rediscovered by Europeans? I can buy that. I'd still require proof, but I can accept that this might happen. Primitive glider-type airplanes developed by Indians thousands of years ago? This is getting more far fetched and requires more proof, but perhaps someone there made one glider that worked for one flight. Advanced planes with the capability for space-flight to other planets? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If you want to prove this, you'll need a lot more than "it's written down in some text somewhere." (If written text counts as proof then a thousand years from now there will be proof that Americans had galaxy-wide space-flight capability in the 20th Century thanks to some sci-fi stories.)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Indians a thousand years ago having modern or even futuristic technology that was lost without a trace save for writing in one book (which might be open to interpretation) is *NOT* extraordinary proof.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That's a nice word salad you have there.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
The thing about the Pythagorean Theorem is completely true and well-documented (by maybe one or two hundred years). Pretty sure it's in a sidebar to the college algebra text I teach out of.
Wikipedia: "In India, the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, the dates of which are given variously as between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century BC, contains a list of Pythagorean triples discovered algebraically, a statement of the Pythagorean theorem, and a geometrical proof of the Pythagorean theorem for an isosceles right triangle. The Apastamba Sulba Sutra (ca. 600 BC) contains a numerical proof of the general Pythagorean theorem, using an area computation. Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Boyer (1991) thinks the elements found in the ulba-stram may be of Mesopotamian derivation.[67]... Pythagoras, whose dates are commonly given as 569–475 BC, used algebraic methods to construct Pythagorean triples..."
[67] Carl Benjamin Boyer (1968). "China and India". A history of mathematics. Wiley. p. 229.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
There's all kinds of examples, maybe more often the case than not, that mathematical principles get named after someone other than the original discoverer. It doesn't even require "forgotten knowledge" or anything like that, just some kind of power relationship at play. In fact, Stigler's Law of Eponomy (named after Stephen Stigler, Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago) states, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." See also: Matthew Effect and Boyer's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
Here's professor Richard Lipton writing on that particular subject:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/why-is-everything-named-after-gauss/ ... but obviously the other stuff mentioned at the conference is total looney-tunes.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's a very long distance from fanciful imagery in ancient texts (Ezekiel's wheel is a UFO, obviously, for example) to the historical existence of a nuclear war.
Explanations for natural and/or artifical oddities have to be seriously sought before giving credence to theories developed by those looking to use seeming correlations to bolster possible fantasies. How many times has Nostradamus been proved "correct"? It is a human trait to look for correlations; if the first three times your tribe passed a rock outcropping it was attacked by a lion, maybe those who noticed the pattern survived to pass down the trait of observation. There is, to my knowlege, never been a seriously funded and staffed attempt to look for rational explanations for fear of offending the believers.
We make artificial diamonds now; it's just not cost-effective compared to low-wage workers digging and dying in Africa.
When's the last time Buddhists staged a jihad?
...everyone's Indian really. Here's some examples from British sitcom, Goodness Gracious Me!: https://www.youtube.com/playli...