As the country brims with pride, and rightly so at the success of Chandrayaan 3, the landing of Vikram on the moon established Bharath on the world map of space science permanently. The program director in his emotional speech, mentioned that the success was not of Chandrayaan 3 alone but also of Chandrayaan 1 and 2, that this is an incremental success. He also humbly thanked everyone for their ‘intentional and unintentional help’, for all said and done, the failure of Chandrayaan 2 brought with it jibes and doubts, but these great minds persevered, learned from the failure and transformed the failure into success.
But is our legacy in space science recent? Not quite. In 2015, G Madhavan Nair (the chairman of ISRO 2003-09), while addressing an international conference mentioned “Some shlokas in one of the Vedas say that there is water on the moon, but none believed it. Through our Chandrayaan mission, we could establish that, and we were the first ones to find that out.” He further mentioned, “Even for Chandrayaan, the equation of Aryabhatta was used.”
Despite having a centuries-old legacy of profound knowledge in space science and astronomy, why did it take us so long to make this journey and reach thus far? What legacy do you ask? Let’s delve a little deeper into our own scriptures. In 499CE, Aryabhatta was the first to express the value of π (ratio of a circle’s circumference/ diameter) in his Aryabhatiyam, which states: चतुरधिकं शतमष्टगुणं द्वाषष्टिस्तथा सहस्राणाम् आयुतद्वयविष्कम्भस्यासन्नो वृत्तपरिणहः |. This loosely translates to ‘Adding 4 to 100 and multiplying by 8 thereafter adding to 62,000, is approximately the circumference of a circle with a diameter 20,000.’ In other words, π = 62832 / 20000 = 3.1416. Interestingly, a sloka in Rigveda, also mentions the value of Pi accurately to 32 decimal places, ‘गोपीभाग्य मधुव्रातः श्रुंगशोदधि संधिगः | खलजीवितखाताव गलहाला रसंधरः ||’ Substituting the letters in the shloka with their corresponding numerals one can derive the value of ‘pi’ which is 3.1415926535897932384626433832792…
And if you thought this was some random coincidence, wait, there’s more. Brahmasphutasiddhanta (628) written by Brahmagupta records his observation on gravity: “A body falls towards the Earth as it is the nature of the Earth to attract bodies just as it in the nature of the water to flow”, Bhaskara in his book ‘Surya Siddanta’ (1150) elaborated on it and went on to invent calculus.
The heliocentric planetary model in which Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn orbit the Sun, was developed by Nilkantha Somayaji in 1500 AD, he also correctly derived the formula for the equation for the center of Mercury and Venus (Tantrasangraha). But have we studied any of them? We know Newton for gravity, and Copernicus for the heliocentric model, but not our own proud sanatani sages who discovered, and invented an entire treasure trove of knowledge way before the West could even read or write.
Some of our ancient scriptures are so futuristic that it is mind-boggling how with such limited resources, they could envision and perceive science that the modern world with high throughput systems took eons to re-discover and re-invent. When the scientists of ISRO went to pray at a temple before the launch of Chandrayaan, people were quick to mock them, let us understand why we have this inclination to mock and underestimate our own.
Through the years of colonization – Islamic, Portugal, French, British, our beliefs in our system of education, religion, and culture were eroded, and we were brainwashed into being slaves to our colonizers. Our colonizers have long been defeated and have left, we ceased to be slaves, albeit physically. However, many of us continue to have a colonized mind, and our current systems continue to be slaves of a bygone era. As a result, we are constantly seeking validation from the West.
Interestingly, if you observe the scientific community the world over, you will notice that the West sees our scriptures as a wealth of knowledge and starts with believing what is written in them and then proving it right through rigorous experiments. For example, Atharva Veda clearly states that sunlight travels in a straight line and propagates in waves. Modern physicists from the West have confirmed this.
Vaimanika Shastra or Aeronautical Engineering was authored by Sage Bharatwaja roughly about 6000 years ago. It has detailed configurations of the flying machines, the precise mechanism that enables coping with turbulent weather, weapons that can be carried on fighter flying machines, clothing, and food for pilots. Is it not astounding that centuries ago our ancestors could discover such fine technology and master it, whilst we remain unaware?
NASA is said to have possession of many of our scriptures, they have employed scientists who are well-versed in Sanskrit in order to decode our scriptures, while a majority of us are not conversant with Sanskrit thereby the wealth in our scriptures remains in oblivion. In fact, Germany is at the forefront of science and technology, and they have gone ahead to include and prioritize Sanskrit in their top universities. The affinity of German philosophers and scientists for Sanskrit is well known, they are now ensuring they embrace it to decode and unravel treasures hidden in our scriptures. It is time we rise and reclaim our scriptures to leverage the plethora of knowledge embedded in them.
One of the core pillars of Sanatan dharma is spiritual education wherein questioning and exploring are encouraged, hence it isn’t surprising that our ancestors observed nature, experimented, explored, and implemented their learnings. It is therefore heartening to see part of our scientific community waking up to our intrinsic knowledge wealth, and the success of Chandrayaan is just the beginning in that direction.
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