Indians knew about gravity before Newton: Isro ex-chief

[Levina]

Well, they had their gardens for dumping shit

yuck!
talk something else.

 

[janon]

1) This statement was NOT made by a dilettante or uneducated religious zealot, but by an ex ISRO chief. He definitely knows a lot more than you and I do. Agree?

Sorry, but that is not how science works. It does not matter who said it - whether the statement can be supported by facts and logic is what matters. Even if Einstein said it, he would be wrong. That's the difference between science and other branches of human endeavour - science is objective. The scientific method itself was invented to make the process of enquiry objective. That is why things like peer review etc are so important. Here is a video of the legendary Pofessor Feynman making this point, calling it the "key to science" (from 40 sec onward):

2) The issue with ancient technologies was that only few had access to it. Remember methods of Surgery by Sushrutha? Or let me tell you about "puma punku", those structures 're older than pyramids. The massive stones used in the construction bear no chisel marks and were finely cut to interlock with the others. A lot of the stones were cut so precisely that the builders clearly had an extremely sophisticated knowledge of stone-cutting, engineering and geometry. Now that was thousands of years ago.

Knowledge of stone cutting or geometry is possible. Nobody is denying that. But the theory of gravitation was impossible to be formulated before anybody had even propounded the concept of "force". Nobody is saying that the ancients knew nothing - of course they knew a lot of geometry, architecture, masonry etc. But science is cumulative - you don't discover something big in science before knowing the small things. People who did not know electricity and magnetism, and could not build a dynamo or generator, could not understand quantum physics.

 

[45'22']

Brahmagupta, the ancient Indian astronomer and mathematician, held the view that the earth was spherical and that it attracts things. Al Hamdānī and Al Biruni quote Brahmagupta saying "Disregarding this, we say that the earth on all its sides is the same; all people on the earth stand upright, and all heavy things fall down to the earth by a law of nature, for it is the nature of the earth to attract and to keep things, as it is the nature of water to flow, that of fire to burn, and that of the wind to set in motion. If a thing wants to go deeper down than the earth, let it try. The earth is the only low thing, and seeds always return to it, in whatever direction you may throw them away, and never rise upwards from the earth."

History of gravitational theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ancient Indian mathematician Bhaskaracharya, in his book Siddhanta Shriromani, defined laws of gravity in the 12th century, 500 years before Newton defined them for us. The speed of light has been known to Indians since the Vedic period, centuries before it was calculated by the Western world.
Maitree, a group of professionals from Tata Consultancy Services and Bengaluru-based NGO Samskrita Bharati, have come together with a unique exhibition, Pride of India, to spread awareness about India's rich scientific heritage.
The exhibition in Pune on Friday April 16th showcased 150 posters, each explaining one Sanskrit shloka from ancient Indian scientific literature.
"The shlokas (verses) by ancient scientists and mathematicians like Bhaskaracharya, Baudhayana, Apastambha and Bhaskaracharya's daughter Leelavati have been showcased in the exhibition." said Aashish Manjaramkar, exhibition coordinator. "Our aim is to tell that zero is not the only contribution that Indians have made to science and math." he added.
Manjramkar commented, "Very few of us know that the speed of light was known to Indians in the Vedic period. A shloka says that the speed of light is 2202 yojana per half nimesha. A yojana is a unit of distance which is equal to 9.06 miles and half a nimesha is one tenth of a second. The figure is very close to the modern measurement of speed of light."
"One of the shlokas in the exhibition describes a conversation between Bhaskaracharya and his daughter Leelavati, who also was a mathematician. The conversation beautifully explains the spherical shape of the earth and the gravitational force that keeps planets revolving in space," said Manjaramkar.
Samskrita Bharati, which works in all major cities of India and also in 16 US cities, was established in 1983 and works for the promotion of Sanskrit as a spoken language. The organization regularly stages such events across India.

Indians Knew the Laws of Gravity 500 Years Before Newton
Indians Knew the Laws of Gravity 500 Years Before Newton, Video - Firstpost

This is not surprising
I believe this


They may not have done the maths or have proof but they surely did knew a lot of things.....this being one of them


I don't understand why people are surprised....

 

[RescueRanger]

 

[Screambowl]

Keeps getting better & better..

Although Mr Nair a South Indian didn't know Harappa etx were lie in Pak .. Punjab .. The same Pubjabis who pretty much hated "hindustanis" ... Where hinduism couldn't take much root..

Musalman never contributed anything except for trolling. Right? Please stop your trolls.

 

[Levina]

Sorry, but that is not how science works. It does not matter who said it - whether the statement can be supported by facts and logic is what matters. Even if Einstein said it, he would be wrong. That's the difference between science and other branches of human endeavour - science is objective. The scientific method itself was invented to make the process of enquiry objective. That is why things like peer review etc are so important. Here is a video of the legendary Pofessor Feynman making this point, calling it the "key to science" (from 40 sec onward):

Knowledge of stone cutting or geometry is possible. Nobody is denying that. But the theory of gravitation was impossible to be formulated before anybody had even propounded the concept of "force". Nobody is saying that the ancients knew nothing - of course they knew a lot of geometry, architecture, masonry etc. But science is cumulative - you don't discover something big in science before knowing the small things. People who did not know electricity and magnetism, and could not build a dynamo or generator, could not understand quantum physics.

Read when free..........

Brahmagupta, the ancient Indian astronomer and mathematician, held the view that the earth was spherical and that it attracts things. Al Hamdānī and Al Biruni quote Brahmagupta saying "Disregarding this, we say that the earth on all its sides is the same; all people on the earth stand upright, and all heavy things fall down to the earth by a law of nature, for it is the nature of the earth to attract and to keep things, as it is the nature of water to flow, that of fire to burn, and that of the wind to set in motion. If a thing wants to go deeper down than the earth, let it try. The earth is the only low thing, and seeds always return to it, in whatever direction you may throw them away, and never rise upwards from the earth."

History of gravitational theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ancient Indian mathematician Bhaskaracharya, in his book Siddhanta Shriromani, defined laws of gravity in the 12th century, 500 years before Newton defined them for us. The speed of light has been known to Indians since the Vedic period, centuries before it was calculated by the Western world.
Maitree, a group of professionals from Tata Consultancy Services and Bengaluru-based NGO Samskrita Bharati, have come together with a unique exhibition, Pride of India, to spread awareness about India's rich scientific heritage.
The exhibition in Pune on Friday April 16th showcased 150 posters, each explaining one Sanskrit shloka from ancient Indian scientific literature.
"The shlokas (verses) by ancient scientists and mathematicians like Bhaskaracharya, Baudhayana, Apastambha and Bhaskaracharya's daughter Leelavati have been showcased in the exhibition." said Aashish Manjaramkar, exhibition coordinator. "Our aim is to tell that zero is not the only contribution that Indians have made to science and math." he added.
Manjramkar commented, "Very few of us know that the speed of light was known to Indians in the Vedic period. A shloka says that the speed of light is 2202 yojana per half nimesha. A yojana is a unit of distance which is equal to 9.06 miles and half a nimesha is one tenth of a second. The figure is very close to the modern measurement of speed of light."
"One of the shlokas in the exhibition describes a conversation between Bhaskaracharya and his daughter Leelavati, who also was a mathematician. The conversation beautifully explains the spherical shape of the earth and the gravitational force that keeps planets revolving in space," said Manjaramkar.
Samskrita Bharati, which works in all major cities of India and also in 16 US cities, was established in 1983 and works for the promotion of Sanskrit as a spoken language. The organization regularly stages such events across India.

Indians Knew the Laws of Gravity 500 Years Before Newton
Indians Knew the Laws of Gravity 500 Years Before Newton, Video - Firstpost

 

[Armstrong]

Read when free..........

Auntie please burn all your engineering degrees !

 

[Levina]

Auntie please burn all your engineering degrees !

Sweetie...
IGNORANCE IS A VOLUNTARY MISFORTUNE!!!!!

 

[MokshaVimukthi]

I agree with our Pakistani and yet-to-arrive Chinese mockers - this is getting ridiculous.

Impossible, because the concept of "force" itself was invented by Newton. Before that, nobody thought or described anything in terms of forces. That doesn't mean that nobody could describe gravitation - just that nobody would describe it in terms of "force", and therefore that "F" in the equation would have been meaningless to them.

That is incorrect. Bhaskaracharya has written about gravitational "force" and how it holds the other planets in place. So its clear Newton did not invent it.

Newton discovered the relationship between mass, acceleration and force. Not quite the same thing.

Bhaskara also described the circular motions of other planets which could be represented as motion along a small circle or as motion centre moves along the circumference of a circle whose centre did not lie at the centre of the earth. The diagrammatic representation of the true motions was called 'chedyaka'. An entire chapter in his book, chedyakadhikara was dedicated to teaching this. This circular motion was attributed to gravitation force of attraction between planets.

In fact Bhaskara also invented a method to determine the true instantaneous motion of the planets at any point and this method is used even today to guide Astrology charts and Astronomy charts, one of which was used to guide Chandrayan as mentioned if ISRO chairman.

The instantaneous motion was called "tat kalika gati" and the formula was given by both Aryabhata and Brahmagupta.

u' - u = v' - v +/- e(sin w' - sin w)

Here u = true longitude, v = mean longitude and w=mean anomaly respectively at any particular time.
u' v' and w' represents value at the subsequent instant
e = eccentricity or deviation of a curve from orbit

Instantaneous motion was determined to be the difference U'-U between the true longitudes at the two positions being considered.

 

[janon]

Read when free..........

Don't need to, I have read most of his works long back. What he is describing there is WRONG. I wouldn't blame him forr that, because he was working with very little data. What he has written there is what everybody in the ancient times believed - that everything falls towards the earth, because the earth attracts everything. Aristotle thought that the tendency of earth is to move things down, the tendency of fire is to raise things up, and something similar for wind and water. You don't need a Brahmagupta or an Aristotle to tell you that things fall down - even our prehuman ancestors knew that.

What Newton did was that he radically changed this idea. That's right, he disproved the notion that "all heavy things fall down to the earth by a law of nature,..." (From your quote.)

Newton instead showed that EVERYTHING attracts everything else. The earth does, the moon does, you do, your computer does, etc. It is not that everything tends to fall "down" - it is that everything attract each other. The earth is no special in that. From there he also developed a mathematical model, an equation to calculate how much each thing attracts another thing. That is when it became a theory.

BTW, the words "all heavy things" in that quote also exposes a common misunderstanding. It's not just heavy things, bt light things also fall, and at exactly the same rate.

It's Newton's theories that brought our understanding of gravitation to a new level. The ancients saw things fall down, and assumed that the earth makes everything fall down. Newton changed such notions. BTW, Newton's theory itelf had to be slightly refined later, by Einstein. That is how scientific understanding progresses - step by step, from no understanding to complete understanding.

 

[Armstrong]

Sweetie...
IGNORANCE IS A VOLUNTARY MISFORTUNE!!!!!


View attachment 195445

Okay !

 

[janon]

That is incorrect. Bhaskaracharya has written about gravitational "force" and how it holds the other planets in place. So its clear Newton did not invent it.

It wasn't Bhaskaracharya. It was Brahmagupta. Read my post above in response to levina about that.

Yes, he said that the earth attracts things - everybody in the ancient world believed that, because that's what they saw in their everyday experience. What Newton did was to realize that that attraction was in fact universal, between any two bodies, and not just the earth. That was the big breakthrough. Of course, he also quantified the attraction by a very ingenious set of experiments.

 

[MokshaVimukthi]

It wasn't Bhaskaracharya. It was Brahmagupta. Read my post above in response to levina about that.

Yes, he said that the earth attracts things - everybody in the ancient world believed that, because that's what they saw in their everyday experience. What Newton did was to realize that that attraction was in fact universal, between any two bodies, and not just the earth. That was the big breakthrough. Of course, he also quantified the attraction by a very ingenious set of experiments.

Bhaskara defined the circular motion of the plant and attributed it to gravity. Gravity itself and the heliocentric system was first taught by aryabhata. Brahmagupta came much later.

Read my post again to understand how planarity motion was determined by an understanding of the effects of gravity.

 

[Skull and Bones]

Many people knew about gravity before Newton, but did they explained it in mathematical formulas?

 

[Screambowl]

If they knew nothing about gravity, how Indian were able to build complex structure neglecting Fg(Gravitational force). Or fountains in palaces or highly advance sanitary system in Harappa?

Gravitation is one of the subjects taught in Civil Engineering in common lecture of Mech. Civil, Phys. departments.