Scientific advances of india

Many of the advances in sciences that we consider today to have been made in Europe were in fact made in India centuries ago. The ancient Hindus laid the foundation of mathematical, scientific, spiritual, medical, ethical, and psychological knowledge. They conceived and developed the sciences of logic and grammar and made great advances in fields so divergent as astronomy, aeronautics and architecture, music, medicine, and mathematics, mythology and martial arts,philosophy and physics, religion and rational logic. In the words of Einstein” We owe a lot to Hindus, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.” India invented the zero and shared it with the world. Without zero there would be no binary system and no computers; counting would be clumsy and cumbersome. Ancient Hindus contributed in branches of mathematics like algebra, trigonometry, geometry, quadratic and higher degree equations and calculus. The famous Pythagoras Theorem is explained several centuries before in the shulva sutras of the Vedas. It is believed that the much travelled Pythagoras was a student at the Takshashila University in undivided India and he carried with him knowledge of mathematics, medicine and transmigration of the soul to the western world. Australian Indologist A.L Basham in his book,” The wonder that was India” rightly states” the world owes most to India in the realm of mathematics, which was developed to a stage more advanced than that reached by any other nation of antiquity. The success of Indian mathematics was mainly due to the fact that Indians had a clear conception of the abstract number (Algebra) as distinct from the numerical quantity of objects or spatial extension.”  In the 5th Century Aryabhatt discovered many laws of physics which we today attribute to Sir Isaac Newton (1642 -1727). He knew the value of pi. He knew that the earth revolves around the sun, the earth is spherical, that the earth rotates on its axis, that earth is suspended in space and that lunar and solar eclipses occur by interplay of the sun, moon and earth. He also knew the laws of gravity, circumference of the earth, distance between the planets and the sun, revolutionary movement of the earth around the sun and so on. The ancient Hindus’ contributions in sciences are infinite, but given my limitations of space, I wish to conclude by stating that; Hinduism and Vedic thoughts are criticised by people who only imperfectly understood them.