INDIA:FACT FILE

INDIA:FACT FILE

We owe a lot to Indians

who taught us how to count,

without which no worthwhile

scientific discovery could

have been made.

Albert Einstein

After the conversations about Indian

philosophy, some of the ideas of

Quantum Physics that had seemed so

crazy suddenly made much more sense.

Werner Heisenberg

What we shall find in Modern Physics is an

exemplification, an encouragement and a

refinement of old Hindu wisdom.

Julius R. Oppenheimer

Some blood transfusion from the

East to the West is must to save

Western science from spiritual

anaemia.

Erwin Schroedinger

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from

the banks of the Ganga — Astronomy, Astrology,

Spiritualism, etc.

It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the

least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga to learn

Geometry...

But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange

journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not

been long established in Europe...

Francois M. Voltaire

The motion of the stars calculated by

the Hindus before some 4500 years

vary not even a single minute from the

modern tables of Cassine and Meyer.

Jean-Sylvain Bailly

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when

Western civilization discovers ‘ Relativity

Theory’ it applies it to the manufacture of

atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization

applies it to the development of new states of

consciousness.

Alan Watts

The vastest knowledge of today cannot

transcend the buddhi (intellect) of the Rishis in

ancient India; and science, in its most advanced

stage now, is closer to Vedanta

than ever before.

Alfred North Whitehead

To the Indian Rishis the ‘Divine play’ was the

evolution of the cosmos through countless aeons.

They say, there is an infinite number of creations in

an infinite universe. The Rishis gave the name

kalpa to the unimaginable span of time between the

beginning and the end of creation.

Fritjof Capra

India - the land of Vedas, the remarkable

works contains not only religious ideas for

a perfect life, but also facts which science

has proved true. Electricity, radium,

electronics, airship, all are known to the

seers who founded the Vedas.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The Hinduism is the only one of the world’s

greatest 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.

Dr. Carl Sagan

Mankind's origins can be traced to India, where

the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom

and virtue with a simplicity, strength and

sublimity which has - frankly spoken - nothing,

nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical,

cold European world.

Johann Gottfried Herder

The Hindu systems of astronomy are by

far the oldest and that from which the

Egyptians, Greek, Romans and - even the

Jews derived from the Hindus their

knowledge.

Jean-Sylvain Bailly

It is India that gave us the ingenious method

of expressing all numbers by ten symbols,

each receiving a value of position as well as

an absolute value, a profound and important

idea which appears so simple to us now that

we ignore its true merit.

Pierre Simon de Laplace

The Vedanta and the Sankhya hold the key to

the laws of mind and thought process which

are co-related to the Quantum Field, i.e. the

operation and distribution of particles at

atomic and molecular levels.

Brian David Josephson

To the philosophers of India, however, ‘Theory of

Relativity’ is no new discovery, just as the concept

of light years is no matter for astonishment to

people used to thinking of time in millions of

kalpas, (one kalpa is about 4,320,000 years).

Alan Watts

Yoga, as a 'science' of achieving this

transformation of finite man into the infinite,

One has to be recognized as something

intrinsically Indian or, as 'a specific dimension

of the Indian mind.

Mircea Eliade

Wherever we direct our attention

to Hindu literature, the notion of

infinity presents itself.

Sir William Jones

It is the ancient Indian culture that has

regarded the science of numbers as the

noblest of its arts...

A thousand years ahead of Europeans,

Indian Savants knew that the zero and

infinity were mutually inverse notions.

Georges Ifrah

Ancient India gave to the world its religions and

philosophies. Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom

and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study

under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened

of human beings.

Pierre Sonnerat

Nearly all the philosophical and mathematical doctrines

attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India.

Leopold von Schroeder

The most important characteristic of the Eastern world

view - one could almost say the essence of it - is the

awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all

things and events, the experience of all phenomena in

the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things

are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts

of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the

same ultimate reality.

Fritjof Capra

The atomic structure of matter is mentioned in

the Hindu treatises Vaisesika and Nyaya. The

Yoga Vasishta says: ----- there are vast worlds

within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as

the specks in a sunbeam ----- which we have

assumed now as true.

Andrew Tomas

India was China's teacher in religion and

imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in

Trigonometry, Quadratic Equations, Grammar,

Phonetics, Arabian Nights, Animal fables, chess, as

well as in philosophy, and that she inspired

Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer,

Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

Dr. Lin Yutang

Long before it became a scientific

aspiration to estimate the age of the earth,

many elaborate systems of the world

chronology had been devised by the sages

of antiquity.

Professor Arthur Holmes

We catch a glimpse of the great river of science

which never ceases to flow in India. For India

has carried and scattered the data of

intellectual progress for the whole world, ever

since the pre-Buddhist period when she

produced the Sankhya philosophy and the

atomic theory.

Professor Kakuzo Okakura

Have we not here the whole of Darwinian evolution confirmed by

geology and foreseen at least 6,000 years ago? On the other

hand, is this not the theory of Akasa which we more clumsily call

the ether, the sole source of all substances, to which our science

is returning? But the scientific ether is not precisely the Hindu

Akasa which is much more subtle and immaterial being a sort of

spiritual element or divine energy, space uncreated,

imperishable, and infinite.

Count Maurice Maeterlinck