Essay:
Indian Foundations of Modern Science
By Professor Subhash Kak
Regents Professor and a previous Head of Computer Science Department at Oklahoma State University

Scholars see India and Greece as the two principal birthplaces of science. School textbooks tell us about Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy, geometry of the Vedic altars, the invention of zero in India, Yoga psychology, and Indian technology of steel-making that went into the manufacture of the best swords. But if you take the trouble of reading scholarly books, articles and encyclopedias, you will find that in many ways the early Indian contributions are the more impressive for they include a deep theory of mind, Pāṇini’s astonishing Sanskrit grammar, binary numbers of Piṅgala, music theory, combinatorics, algebra, earliest astronomy, and the physics of Kaṇāda with its laws of motion.

Of these, Kaṇāda is the least known. He may not have presented his ideas as mathematical equations, but he attempted something that no physicist to date has dared to do: he advanced a system that includes space, time, matter, as well as observers. He also postulated four types of atoms, two with mass (like proton and electron) and two without (like neutrino and photon), and the idea of invariance. A thousand or more years after Kaṇāda, Āryabhaṭa postulated that earth rotated and advanced the basic idea of relativity of motion.

And then there is India’s imaginative literature, which includes the Epics, the Purāṇas and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (perhaps the greatest novel ever written), that speaks of time travel, airplanes, exoplanets (that is many solar-like systems), cloning of embryos, sex change, communication over distances, and weapons that can destroy everything. Some nationalists take these statements to mean the literal scientific truth, which claim is ridiculed by their political opponents who then use this broad brush to tar all Indian science.

There are also anomalous statements in Indian texts whose origin is not understood. Just to mention a few: the correct speed of light, the correct distance to the sun, cosmological cycles that broadly correspond to the numbers accepted currently, the fact that the sun and the moon are approximately 108 times their respective diameters from the earth, the correct number of species on earth (about 8.4 million), and so on. Historians either ignore them or say that they are extraordinary coincidences. We will come to these anomalies later in the essay.

To return to the history of mainstream science, the discovery of infinite series and calculus by Newton and Leibniz heralded the Scientific Revolution that was to change the world. But new research has shown that over two centuries prior the Kerala School of Mathematics had already developed calculus and some historians suggest that this and advanced astronomical knowledge from Kerala went abroad via the Jesuits and provided the spark for its further development in Europe. Other historians discount the transmission of this knowledge to Europe.

There is more agreement about the many achievements of Indian medical sciences. For example, the Royal Australia College of Surgeons in Melbourne, Australia has a prominent display of a statue of Suśruta (600 BCE) with the caption “Father of Surgery”. The ancient Ayurveda texts include the notion of germs and inoculation and also postulate mind-body connection, which has become an important area of contemporary research. Indian medicine was strongly empirical; it used Nature (which is governed by Ṛta) as guide, and it was informed by a sense of skepticism. In the West the notion of skepticism is usually credited to the Scottish philosopher of science, David Hume, but scholars have been puzzled by the commonality between his ideas and the earlier Indian ones. Recently, it was shown that Hume almost certainly learnt Indian ideas from Jesuits when he was at the Royal College of La Flèche in France.

There are also indirect ways that Indian ideas led to scientific advance. Mendeleev was inspired by the two-dimensional structure of the Sanskrit alphabet to propose a similar two-dimensional structure of chemical elements. Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum theory, credited ideas in the Upanishads for the key notion of superposition that was to bring about the quantum revolution in physics that changed chemistry, biology, and technology.

I now briefly touch upon Indian influence on linguistics, logic, philosophy of physics, and theory of mind.

Linguistics, algorithms and society

Pāṇini’s work (4th or 5th century BCE) showed the way to the development of modern linguistics through the efforts of scholars such as Franz Bopp, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Bopp was a pioneering scholar of the comparative grammars of Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages. Ferdinand de Saussure in his most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), that was published posthumously (1916), took the idea of the use of formal rules of Sanskrit grammar and applied them to general linguistic phenomena.

The structure of Pāṇini‘s grammar contains a meta-language, meta-rules, and other technical devices that make this system effectively equivalent to the most powerful computing machine. Although it didn’t directly contribute to the development of computer languages, it influenced linguistics and mathematical logic that, in turn, gave birth to computer science.

The works of Pāṇini and Bharata Muni also presage the modern field of semiotics which is the study of signs and symbols as a significant component of communications. Their template may be applied to sociology, anthropology and other humanistic disciplines for all social systems come with their grammar.

The search for universal laws of grammar underlying the diversity of languages is ultimately an exploration of the very nature of the human mind. But the Indian texts remind that the other side to this grammar is the idea that a formal system cannot describe reality completely since it leaves out the self.

Modern logic

That Indian thought was central to the development of machine theory is asserted by Mary Boole — the wife of George Boole, inventor of modern logic — who herself was a leading science writer in the nineteenth century. She claimed that George Everest, who lived for a long time in India and whose name was eventually applied to the world’s highest peak, was the intermediary of the Indian ideas and they influenced not only her husband but the other two leading scientists in the attempt to mechanize thought: Augustus de Morgan and Charles Babbage. She says in her essay on Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth Century (1901): “Think what must have been the effect of the intense Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan, and George Boole on the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–65.” She further speculates that these ideas influenced the development of vector analysis and modern mathematics.

Much prior to this, Mohsin Fani’s Dabistani-i Madhahib (17th Century) claimed that Kallisthenes, who was in Alexander’s party, took logic texts from India and the beginning of the Greek tradition of logic must be seen in this material. In Indian logic, minds are not empty slates; the very constitution of the mind provides some knowledge of the nature of the world. The four pramāṇas through which correct knowledge is acquired are direct perception, inference, analogy, and verbal testimony.

Physics with observers

Indian physics, which goes back to the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras (c. 500 BCE), does not appear to have directly influenced the discovery of physical laws in Europe. But Indian ideas that place the observer at center prefigure the conceptual foundations of modern physics, and this is acknowledged by the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.

In the West, the universe was seen as a machine going back to Aristotle and the Greeks who saw the physical world consisting of four kinds of elements of earth, water, fire, and air. This model continued in Newton’s clockwork model of the solar system. Indian thought, in contrast, has a fifth element, ākāśa, which is the medium for inner light and consciousness. With the rise of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the observer could no longer be ignored. In one sense, the journey of science is the discovery of self and consciousness.

It is one of those obscure footnotes to the history of physics that Nikola Tesla, who was very famous in the 1890s, was asked by Swami Vivekananda to find an equation connecting mass and energy. We know that Tesla didn’t quite succeed at this but he was to work on various models of wireless transfer of energy for the remainder of his career.

Cosmology and evolution

The Ṛgveda speaks of the universe being infinite in size. The evolution of the universe is according to cosmic law. Since it cannot arise out of nothing, the universe must be infinitely old. Since it must evolve, there are cycles of chaos and order or creation and destruction. The world is also taken to be infinitely old. Beyond the solar system, other similar systems were postulated, which appear to have been confirmed with the modern discovery of exoplanets.

The Sāṅkhya system describes evolution at cosmic and individual levels. It views reality as being constituted of puruṣa, consciousness that is all-pervasive, and prakṛti, which is the phenomenal world. Prakṛti is composed of three different strands (guṇas or characteristics) of sattva, rajas, and tamas, which are transparency, activity, and inactivity, respectively.

Evolution begins by puruṣa and prakṛti creating mahat (Nature in its dynamic aspect). From mahat evolves buddhi (intelligence) and manas (mind). Buddhi and manas in the large scale are Nature’s intelligence and mind. From buddh