P A Q

• Q : We bring you 'India’s Mysterious 5 Contest' where we feature one unsolved, mysterious question everyday, for 5 days. Yesterday's question was- How has the iron pillar in Delhi not rusted inspite of being made by 98% impure iron? If you missed it, answer it today.
•  A : I think most of the people here are missing the point. The question here is not whether the indians were better than the rest or if they really knew the spped of light?
  
  They already knew the calculations and calculated in their prevalent units. The question here is HOW did they measure it sooo accurately without the use of complicated instruments that we posses?
  To give a brief about how the ancient indians managed the calculation of the speed of light, we need to know how did we calculate the speed of light today?
  
  Refer to the attached link on how Roemer calculated the spped of light.
  
  http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/wav…
  
  Now if you know that the planets revolve around the run and moons around the planets it does nto remain so difficult correct? Now we know that the sun/ moon / stars appears to move faster when on top rather than the horizon. This is also partially because the light reaches us marginally later than when they are at the top of the sky. Taking this logic if you apply to the stars of to a comet. We will have a situation very similar to Roemer's. I can think of a million ways to calculate the speed of light just by knowing the path of the celestial bodies. And we KNOW the ancient Indians had already calculated this. So it is no surprise that they knew the spped of light.
  
  Do we really think that we need to have super computers to calculate such data? I would suggest a small reading of vedic mathematics. This science makes making huge calculations much simpler. Once the maths is made simple, the rest is just a matter of observation and experimentation. We do know that ancient indians knew the value of PI to a much greater decimal point than most of us have botherred to calculate. We also know that they were able to distinguish between planets and stars and knew that the earth reloved around the sun.
  
  When we learn that the speed of light was discovered is a particular year, we are learning the western history NOT the knowledge we accumulated over the years.
  
  The only difference between the western discovery and indian discovery is that we beat them by a few thousand years. The speed of light is not the only discovery, we knew about the pythagoras theorm before pythagoras discoverd it. :-) We knew about atoms before Bhor bombarded a gold foil with electrons. We knew about plastic surgery long before the beauty peagents were invented.
  
  We marvel at the old knowledge because the west has led us to believe that we are a poor country of idiots and they are the smart ones. Why else are our discoveries credited to their scientists? 

Labels: Indian

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