28-Apr-2013, 07:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 29-Apr-2013, 08:44 AM by Captain Mandrake.)
kpbolumbu01,
This thread was started by someone with the claim that speed of light can be found in Vedas based on a couplet in a hymn that roughly goes "Sun travel 2000 Yojanas in half nimesha". From this couplet Hindutwadi apologist like some on the forum and Subhash Kak have concluded that speed of light was known to Indians during Vedic times.
There are several problems with the claim and the conclusion. These are listed (already covered in various posts on this thread) below.
1) The hymn is about the Sun and not about the light.
2) The way Yojana and Nimesha are related to standard units like mile and second through intermediates "units" such as duration of a blink of an eye, width of human hair, height of man, travel distance of bullock. All of these have so much variability in them that by the time you make the connection between the non-standard Yojana and Nimesha to mile and second there will be huge error stack up.
3) The experimental set up and instruments used to arrive at the speed of light in Vedas is not presented anywhere.
Even if we are charitable enough to overlook concerns 1) and 2) what can not be overlooked is concern 3).
You (kpbolumbu01) however have not addressed even one of these concerns. If you think Subhash Kak's paper addresses these concerns then please present your case against these concerns based on what you learnt from his paper and convince the freethinkers of your position. If you can not do that no one here is going to buy what you are selling.
This thread was started by someone with the claim that speed of light can be found in Vedas based on a couplet in a hymn that roughly goes "Sun travel 2000 Yojanas in half nimesha". From this couplet Hindutwadi apologist like some on the forum and Subhash Kak have concluded that speed of light was known to Indians during Vedic times.
There are several problems with the claim and the conclusion. These are listed (already covered in various posts on this thread) below.
1) The hymn is about the Sun and not about the light.
2) The way Yojana and Nimesha are related to standard units like mile and second through intermediates "units" such as duration of a blink of an eye, width of human hair, height of man, travel distance of bullock. All of these have so much variability in them that by the time you make the connection between the non-standard Yojana and Nimesha to mile and second there will be huge error stack up.
3) The experimental set up and instruments used to arrive at the speed of light in Vedas is not presented anywhere.
Even if we are charitable enough to overlook concerns 1) and 2) what can not be overlooked is concern 3).
You (kpbolumbu01) however have not addressed even one of these concerns. If you think Subhash Kak's paper addresses these concerns then please present your case against these concerns based on what you learnt from his paper and convince the freethinkers of your position. If you can not do that no one here is going to buy what you are selling.