Age of Universe -- answer from ancient generations

d1k, please read the above post from Nygdan -- you see, you can speculate about what ancient civilizations could or couldn't do, but that's just that -- speculation. Like I said, the alien overlord Zudu could be transmitting to my brain, or not. Call it a fantasy or speculation.

Until there is a shred of evidence -- speculations are just a waste of time. I also disagree that we are "toddlers" when it comes to science -- sure enough there are mysteries, a lot of them, and some to which we may never know the answer, but our theories do have predictive power and are sometimes quite amazing. If you knew phyisics, I'm sure you'd certainly agree. There are plenty of examples -- discovery of quarks, relativistic effects in the behavior of Mercury's orbit etc. There are plenty of things where we do a crack job of understanding the Universe. You are free, of course, to wait for transmissions from Zudu or literally interpret ancient vedic texts...

I would disagree Aelita, in so far as if man is a toddler wrt science or not. I sometimes call to mind the saying, and I forget who said this but it was a 'big' scientist, that 'we're just a kid on a beach who's found an interesting shell', the implication being, its a beach, there's lots of shells!!! Millions of em!!!

But I would say that ancient man didn't even know he was on a beach or what a shell was, to keep up the analogy. Vedic, European, or otherwise.

That’s not actually true. Ancient Hindu astronomy was very advanced when compared with other societies. For example, a Scottish mathematician named John Playfair calculated the date of origin of the currently used Hindu astronomical table to be approximately 4300BC.

This theory was contested at the time as nearly heretical. The opposing possibility was that based on current observations, the Hindus back calculated the precise positions of stars and constellations. Lets keep in mind that that is very nearly impossible to do.

koenraadelst.bharatvani.org...


An interesting side not about the Kali Yuga. This age was to begin with the alignment of seven bodies, Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn The Sun and the Moon, with Ketu, the southern lunar node. This occurred on February 18, 3102BC. The only way for this to be as accurate a calendar entry as it was, it must have been made with direct observation.

I have heard that the vedic texts talk about features of the sky that date to 6-5kya ago also.


Fair enough. But its a far cry from that to measuring the speed of light and calculating the age of the universe. That's the part that seems to be based upon religious thought, not rational though.

THink of it this way, look at what the rational method was able to accomplish, accurate astronomical measurements before 4000 BC (regardless of whether the stars were thought to be gods or anything like that, the methods required were rational observation). WHile on the other hand, the jibber-jabber about the movement of the sun only leads to claims, 6 thousand years later (iow today) of knowing the speed of light. Imagine if the same methodological practice for the astronomical observations had been applied to all arenas.

I mean, don't get me wrong, all props to india, I'm listening to a mix of kick ass Bhangra music right now!

[edit on 15-5-2006 by Nygdan]

Yeah, I'm reading this book on Sanskrit astronomy right now by Dr. David Pingree. He was absolutely brilliant, and the driving force keeping the History of Mathematics department running at Brown University. Sadly he recently passed away, and to save money, the school is phasing out studies such as Sanskrit astronomy from the curriculum. It's actually very stupid and shortsighted. (sorry, my rant)

Personally, I believe in the alien gods idea. It's fun to think about like that. When you can't explain anything else logically, the next step is "alien gods did it". For example, on the day Feb, 18 3102bc Krishna is said to have breathed his last breath, thereby ushering in the age of darkness. There were no scientific texts esplaining why this day was chosen to begin the Kali Yuga, but I like to think that an alien god died, and so it began. When that is proven wrong, whether through my own research, or someone else's, I'll just attribute the alien god to the next interesting subject. You have no idea how much I've learned that way.

may be, but lets say if our modern age scientists found some day that universe is not expanding, or the universe is egg-shaped or light cannot go out of this universe, then will you accept that vedic astronomy was very advance, more advance than the current age?

Although I am not a linguistic, I think that for a language to be advance, it should be atleast unambiguous and phonetic. In general, natural languages are ambiguous (in various aspects, such as grammer, spell, phonetics etc). So lets say, I want to make a speech recongnition system, it is difficult to build a model which is very reliable (obviously based on the nature and measure of ambiguity of the language) for natural languages like english. So, less the ambiguity, more the model is reliable, thus making the language more advance and scientific. And Sanskrit is the only natural language which does not contain ambiguity of any nature a bit. Infact, many advance languages in the world are emerged from Sanskrit. Read the comments of various linguistics about it.
There is a general belief among some vedic scholars that this universe is programmed into Sanskrit, and thats why it is possible to hack into it to certain extent using various "mantras" in Sanskrit. I am not skilled enough to comment about it.
As a computer science graduate, I can claim that if someday speech compiler is built, it would be built in Sanskrit or Sanskrit like language.
There may be more aspects which makes a language more advance and scientific, but I am not aware of it.
What does it prove? I think it is pretty obvious.

Such a language would be worse than useless to poets, playwrights, novelists, lyricists, comedians, punsters and the like. The literature of an "unambiguous language" would be very dull indeed. I wouldn't call it advanced; I'd call it retarded.


I did a bit of a cruise round the Web looking for claims of this sort. I didn't find any, but I did find numerous assertions that Sanskrit had the least ambiguous grammar of all languages. And do you know what? All those claims were made by Indians.

This doesn't prove the point I made in my previous post about the nationalistically tendentious nature of these 'glorious ancient wisdom' claims, but it does tend to substantiate it, don't you think?


Not quite. The Indo-European group of languages (advanced or otherwise) evolved from a common ancestor. Sanskrit is one of those languages. I believe it is thought by linguists to bear a relatively close resemblance to the ancestral Indo-European tongue, but that is because it has evolved less, not more, than some of the other languages in this group. It's still a very fine language, I'm sure, but the claims you're making for it are excessive -- and oddly enough, rather similar to the ones made by Latinists on behalf of their favourite language. De gustibus non est disputandum? If only, if only.


It proves that people defend ferociously and sometimes unreasoningly what is precious to them. And very rightly so.

Wow, that was completely baseless. India is renouned to this day for it's art and literature.
en.wikipedia.org...

I believe a language with as much range as sanskrit is perfect for artistic use.

Relax. Read what I said more carefully. I said "such a language". Sanskrit, as I pointed out in the same post, is not such a language.

Thank you for the link to the Wikipedia article. I first visited India in 1983, and not as a tourist: I lived and worked there for several months. I have been back many times since, on business as well as for pleasure. I love the country and greatly appreciate its art and culture. If you'll allow me to stray from the point a little, I consider Mumbai (Bombay) to be one of my several homes on this planet, and even though I haven't lived there for years, I still know where to go and what to do when I visit.

As for Indian literature... well, Macaulay famously (or infamously) said that he had "never found [an Orientalist] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." I wouldn't go that far, expecially since it's hard to judge literature in languages you don't read yourself, but in translation, the classics of North Indian literature do tend to come across as repetitive, tedious and above all fossilized -- the petrified bones of what must once have been alive and inspired. Unless you're interested in religious philosophy, they're ditchwater. The South Indian stuff, especially Tamil poetry, is said to be better (and a whole lot more recent), but I've only read little bits and pieces.

Perhaps the North Indian stuff comes to life in the original Sanskrit, Prakrit or whatever. I wouldn't know. But I hope this post clears up any misunderstanding.