Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years.

I suppose it is in our nature to beam in the artificial yet comforting light of the (false) understanding that we once were at the foremost of scientific thought, thus helping us in ignoring or god forbid, forgetting, the follies of our past or pathetic state of our current affairs.

If even after the industrial revolution and the information age, both of which have made our (humans everywhere in general) lives far easier and comfortable and have thus given us an opportunity to carefully think about the state of the world and ascertain, without any bias, our position in it and to plan for our future, some of us still fall for the trap laid down by scheming politicians and (unholy) religious gurus, we truly should not be very proud, either of our past or of our present.

disclaimer: I am an Indian

Where exactly he is glorifying? Merely stating a amazingly correct piece of information from the past cannot be considered glorification. Donald Knuth has a hobby of researching the origins of algorithms and giving the credit where its due[1]. By your logic he too is struck in past and a hindrance to progress. When Carl Sagan famously quoted this, he too was engaging in glorification of the past. If India possessed this knowledge in the past then what should we do? Hide it somewhere, erase it from our memories? I can quote many more examples of East and West drawing from each other but you get the point.

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

> yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? He is just doing plain Arthematics. Do you think this was invented 300 years back by western minds? Well then I will say you are giving too much credit to "Western Minds". In-fact you are engaging in glorification of Western Mind.

> some of us still fall for the trap laid down by scheming politicians and (unholy) religious gurus, we truly should not be very proud, either of our past or of our present.

Did you notice the irony in your argument? You are proud of Western Minds but you do not want to be proud of Indian history?

[1] http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/disk5/js/computer/1.pdf

FWIW, I found this after digging into the comments on the Quora link - https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/9804020v3.pdf. It explains the context of Puranic cosmology.

I, too, am an Indian, and a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. However, it is admittedly enjoyable for me to read about Indian history and ancient science.

>> However, it is admittedly enjoyable for me to read about Indian history and ancient science.

I am with you on this one.

I have read Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagwad Gita ( one of my favorite works ) along with many foreign as well Indian vernacular works. I merely seek to use the teachings/lessons taught in our ancient scriptures so that I can live a wholesome life and find ways for the betterment of my family and my society. It hurts me that some of my well educated fellow countrymen quote these texts to spread pseudo science and sometimes even hatred for others.

Perhaps the skepticism is true, perhaps not.

For me, the take away is not the accuracy in the speed of light.

It's the fact that there was recognition that light is something that has a finite speed that can be measured, and the recognition that that speed is a very high value, measured in thousands of distance units in half of a time unit.

This is extremely remarkable in itself.

Sadly this shows literacy has nothing to do with critical thinking and where the most literate of us should yield a higher standard on consuming fake whatsapp forwards, this shows that it is not always the case. In Ancient times we also invented flying ( pushpak viman) and there is a Shiva temple buried under the Taj Mahal called Tejo Mahalaya? Somewhere in India if we dig deep, we will find fossilized versions of a prehistoric TV set complete with Netflix? Why did they not invent a device to erase all corruption and build some good infrastructure is what boggles my mind.

Why should critical thinking be an effect of literacy? There are people who are not literate by western standards, but pretty sharp(Michael Faraday) and those who are literate but not that clever

There is glory. So? Is it wrong to glorify something that is unique, astounding and clearly thought inducing as to the methods, reasoning, mathematics and observational strengths of ancient Indians?

Glorifying something does not automatically imply "asserting innate superiority". That is just a juvenile view.

So, using a modern device to point out meanings in olden texts implies just what you are saying - "asserting innate superiority of western science"

> "I suppose it is in our nature to beam in the artificial yet comforting light of the (false) understanding that we once were at the foremost of scientific thought, thus helping us in ignoring or god forbid, forgetting, the follies of our past or pathetic state of our current affairs."

Civilizations rise and fall, societies become good, go bad, times always change. Mentioning an advanced scientific achievement of our culture, in my view, sets out an ideal to which we have to collectively strive for, from the present state of affairs. This is true of anyone. There must be a lofty goal, to which the society must strive for. Pointing out an already achieved state is a better stepping stone as it does not give the voices of naysayers any strength.

NOTE : The achievement in this case is that ancient Indians recognized that light has a finite measurable speed and that it is a very high value. To me, this revelation is proof of the advancement of ancient Indian thought.

> Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years.

No, math/physics/chem are no more Western than air/water/sun is. The west was on its quest to conquer the world, so we felt the immense need and desire to twist history projecting a Western superiority, it was much easier to sell to the world - we had all money extracted from plantations and new found world to market aggressively. A lot of ideas known to West originated in East, westerns commercialized them and spread them far and wide, later we also made active efforts to destroy the pieces of evidence too. The only downside was that not all pieces of evidence were available to us at that time, so you'll still find them if you look hard and are lucky enough.

Disclaimer: I am a western.

It’s also totally off topic because not only were these tools not made by Indians they weren’t even made by humans.

Pride in the past or present is a personal choice. Facts about the past/present should not be twisted or ignored for that sake.

My reply to parent got downvoted, which tells you all there is to know. I too like history, but this is stretching it.

Accepted answer:

> This looks very much as if the units may have been converted to obtain the desired result. Indeed the different conversion factors but similar result in your second link increase the likelihood that there may cognitive bias involved

> For example, your distance conversions lead to 1 yojan being 29.2608 kilometres. Compare this with Wikipedia's 12–15 km and your second link's 9.09 miles (about 14.5 km)

> Similarly on time, your calculation gives 202,500 nimishas (twinklings of the eye) in a day-night while Wikipedia quotes Manusmṛti to give 486,000 and your second link gives 409,050

> Both references reach the same result by different conversion factors, which implies they're both biased and unreliable.

True, but an ancient text giving the speed of light even within an order of magnitude is ... interesting. Though it's not clear that the author was really talking about the speed of light and not the speed of the sun. The 2202 is intriguing. To me, unfamiliar with Indian mythology and numerology, it looks like the result of a measurement or a calculation rather than a "magic" number. Is it possible that they calculated the speed of the sun on the assumption that it orbits the earth every day at a distance estimated using Aristarchus's method? With the correct distance to the sun that would give a result of about 1e7 m/s, but they could have had an incorrect distance. In the 3rd century BC Aristarchus himself was out by a factor of about 100, but in the wrong direction, unfortunately for my theory.

In most ancient Indian texts, the meaning of Sanskrit verses refer to light, rather than the sun.

> it looks like the result of a measurement or a calculation rather than a "magic" number

That is because in Sanskrit, numbers are represented in form of "value" "qualifier" "qualifier", "value" "qualifier".. and so on.

For example

"sahasra" means 1000 (can be thousand anything), "sata" means 100, "dasa" means 10, & "varsha" means year (this year, that year, a year, next year, etc)

To quote the famous Ramayana, to represent 11,000 years, it was written in the book as

"dasa varsha shahasrani, dasa varsha sata nicha"

meaning 10 x 1000 years + 10 x 100 years = 11000 years.

One number placed after the other, without any conjunction implied addition.

Elsewhere in the same epic, Rama goes to live in the jungle for

"nava pancha cha varshani"

meaning 9 + 5 years = 14 years, "nava" is 9 and "pancha" is 5

Note : "cha", "nicha" etc are similar to filler words in english

You didn't go through the links yourself? Entire arguments rests on the premise that second as a unit of time was not defined until recently.

I am no way supporting glorification of past but inventing arguments to discredit the past is equally distasteful to me.

I was not expecting to find this reverse engineered piece of logic from Facebooks stream of nonsense to appear on HN.

All well and good, except the Rig Vedic people no longer exist today, nor do their civilisation or thought. Only we do. We need to move forward not look back in nostalgia. It is the same as modern Westerners looking back on ancient Greeks and Romans. There's not a whole lot of good all of this is going to do to the present and future except in so far as there are valuable lessons to be learned.

WE must not make the mistake of being proud of ancient people. We are as far removed from them as the big bang. We should be careful not to identify too closely with imperfect knowledge and scraps of evidence that we have.

Personally speaking, I believe it is unethical and disingenuous to lay claim to achievements that are not one's own, especially those that are (supposedly) part of one's ancestry/heritage, a sentiment I first heard from the great George Carlin [1].

> It is the same as modern Westerners looking back on ancient Greeks and Romans.

I'd have to disagree with you somewhat there. Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. While it is important to live in the present, it is equally important to remember that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. There is a lot of value in casting glances at the past from time to time.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/228332-pride-should-be-rese...

The problem with completely ignoring the discoveries of the past are that we may miss out some solutions to current problems. No harm in learning things from the past

> Rig Vedic people

What exactly do you mean by that?

One question: doesn't the definition of a Yojana vary a lot, with differences across texts and times? I am also very curious about Ancient Indian math, but I think we should also question how results were calculated.

For instance, 108 is a sacred number in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. Some people say it was chosen because the ratio of distances of the Sun and the Moon to Earth is 108 times their respective diameters, and Ancient Indians knew that! But how did they know that?

Make a wooden disc and a stick whose length is 108 times the diameter of the disc. Attach the disc to one end of the stick and hold the other end near your eye. Observe that the disc has the same apparent diameter as the moon, eclipsing it. You could do the same with the sun through light clouds or mist, but be careful, obviously. There are indications that some ancient peoples, such as the builders of Stonehenge, were sufficiently interested in astronomical observation that they might have done a measurement like that and noted the result.

As anyone who's watched Ancient Aliens knows!

Slight /s. Only slight.

I'm not saying people need to take Ancient Aliens at face value, but the show is great when it comes to forcing you to think about how the ancient world really might have been.

I often think the narrative we get in public school history is really just the compromised, politically acceptable version of history. Shows like Ancient Aliens at least get us to ask some questions.

Exactly like how Homeopathy forces us to talk about real medicine? Or UFOs forces us to talk about Rocket design? Take Ancient Aliens at face value? There are other avenues to get your thinking fix from: real books and real research. That's hard to do for an average couch potato addict I think.

How do you think that ancient indians figured out the speed of light, recorded it for posterity, but forgot how to actually calculate it?

Why did Europe go into the dark ages after several years of incredible advancement and prosperity?

We've gotten used to the idea of steady gains and prosperity, but there are cycles that include book burning, knowledge destruction, and civilizational declines. Ancient Aliens forces the viewer to ask what civilizations were even doing with odd constructions and what purpose they served; the only difference is they suggest that extra-terrestrials were involved. Extra terrestrial involvement may seem outlandish to some, but the question of why any civilization was doing what it was remains.

Those statements do not come directly from the rig Veda but instead 13th century commentary on the rig veda

While being correct is a great start, it is necessary to also explain why one is correct. PS. Deep Learning aficionados, take note.