Science is not western in Origin

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सत्येनोत्तभिता भूमिः सूर्येणोत्तभिता दयौः |
रतेनादित्यास्तिष्ठन्ति दिवि सोमो अधि शरितः ||

"""Truth is the base that bears the earth;by Surya are the heavens sustained. By law the Ādityas stand secure; and Soma holds his place in heaven""" RIGVEDA 10.85

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In 1025ad, Private Letters between two catholic scholars - Raoul of Liege and Ragimbold of Cologne tell us that even basic geometrical knowledge did not exist in catholic europe such as the sum of the angles of a triangle makeup 180 degrees. Why was this? Because Science is not western in Origin.
On this paltry diet of timaeus of plato & the aristotelian corpus of boethius – the catholics fed their hunger for a pagan philosophy & science they had heard of but did not have direct access too for nearly 800 years before the 12th century renaissance brough back a lot of greek knowledge which not entirely was greek nevertheless was part of a vast on going transfer of knowledge systems happening viz Asian Civilisational states of BHARAT and China back and forth.

Background.

Science is a creation of the west—or so the claim goes. On this story, science began in Hellenic (Greek) culture, and developed in post-renaissance europe. The rest of the world had no clue.

The origin of science claimed to be western was fabricated in three stages.

LARP first during the Crusades, scientific knowledge from across the world, in captured Arabic books was given a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was all transmitted from the Greeks. The key cases of Euclid (geometry) and Claudius Ptolemy (astronomy)— both concocted figures — are used to illustrate this process.

LARP second, during the Inquisition, world scientific knowledge was again assigned a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was not transmitted from others, but was “independently rediscovered” by Europeans. The cases of Copernicus and Newton (calculus) illustrate this process of “revolution by rediscovery”.

LARP third, later-day racist colonial distortians built on this legacy of glorifying themselves and belittling others. For this purpose, they used (and continue to use) hypocritical standards of evidence to claim “independent rediscovery” in one direction, and transmission in the other direction. Another common trick here is to appeal to the theologically-correct understanding of mathematics or science as the only legitimate one, and thus demand mimicry of the west to retrospectively support false claims of western priority. Alternative cultural filters could just as easily be applied to prove the incorrectness of western knowledge: formal mathematics fails
with Buddhist logic.

This history was contested during the NDA-led regime but with such extreme counter-biases that there was a storm of protest.
Newspapers then highlighted the “saffronization of history”, suggesting that religious fanaticism leads to concocted history as a means of glorification. Certainly this is true, and certainly this needs to be highlighted. But doesn’t this apply to all situations where religion is mixed with state power? The Crusades and the Inquisition were periods of marked religious fanaticism in europe. Did that influence the western history of science? Singularly enough, the role of religious fanaticism in shaping this story seems never to have been assessed. Let us do so right here.

Nevertheless the science is based on experiment. But who invented the experimental method? Most of wester histories attribute it to Francis Bacon in the 17th century. Bacon occupied many high positions in Britain but none of them involved any scientific activities, and Bacon performed no memorable scientific experiment. However, 2,000 years before Bacon, a little-known Indian man called Payasi did perform a series of memorable scientific experiments. We learn this from an impeccable source: the Payasi sutta of the Digha Nikaya, or the Long Discourses (of the Buddha)¹. The sutta recounts a dialogue between King Payasi, a sceptic, and Kumar Kassapa, a young Buddhist monk. As Kassapa was passing through Payasi’s kingdom, Payasi sent word requesting him to tarry a while. Payasi doubted the belief in rewards and punishments in an after-life. He wanted to debate these issues with Kassapa, who agreed. Payasi recounted a comprehensive series of experiments he had performed to test the theory of an afterlife. Payasi knew many people who had lived bad lives – killing, stealing, lying – and approached them on their deathbed with a proposition. If, after death, they went to a place full of woe (hell), then they should come and tell him, or send a message. They agreed, but none of the dead ever returned. Payasi repeated the experiment with ‘good’ people, with the same result, the dead never returned. Payasi went on to wonder, why these good men for whom the rewards of heaven await, did not kill themselves right away. In contrast, Francis Bacon, or his contemporaries, never once dared raise such empirical questions about church beliefs in heaven and hell. Clear proof of the experimental method is found in India, from 2,000 years before Bacon, but never acknowledged by the votaries of scientific temper, who ignore the evidence, and just peddle the myth of the Western origin of science. Source- ¹ दीघनिकाय, Hindi trans. Rahul Sankrityayan, Parammitra Prakashan, Delhi 2002. See also, T. W. Rhys-Davids, trans., Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. 2, London, 1910, pp. 346–74. Reprinted by the Pali Text Society, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. 2, ed. F. Max Muller, Routledge and Keagan Paul, London, 1977. Reproduced in Cârvâka/Lokâyata: An Anthology of Source Materials and some Recent Studies, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya and Mrinal Kanti Gangopadhyaya, ICPR, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 8–3

The Crusades and the story of the ‘Greek’ origin of science-
The story of the Greek origin of science postdates the crusades. Before the Crusades, christendom was in its “Dark Age”. In the 4th c., state and church came together in the Roman empire. The subsequent book-burning edicts of Roman Christian emperors, the burning down of the Great Library of alexandria by a christian
mob and the closure of all philosophical schools by Justinian in 529 CE created a vacuum of secular knowledge in christendom. Such secular knowledge as existed, prior to the Crusades, was pitiful. The outstanding mathematician of the time was Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), who wrote a learned tome on the abacus (the kindergarten toy of today). So, it would be fair to say that the abacus represented the acme of mathematical knowledge in pre-Crusade Christendom. Ironically, this Christian Dark Age coincided with the Islamic Golden Age.

In sharp contrast to the book-burning traditions of Christendom, the Abbasid Caliphate had set up the Baghdad House of Hikmah(Wisdom)by the early 9th c. CE. This led to such an ex-plosion in the demand for books that, along the lines of the hadith to seek knowledge even from China, paper-making techniques were imported from China to set up a paper factory in Baghdad, which had a flourishing book bazaar. Libraries proliferated across the arab world, and the 10th c. Umayyad Caliphate in Cordoba had a library, catalogued in 44 volumes, of over 600,000 tomes.

A quick reference here I will make to the two most renowed arab folks that is Al masudi and Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi in this context which beyond any dubiety establishes Bharat's own indigenous vast knowledge system and its impact on Arab World in those times.

We shall see by far the most celebrated chroniclers among the early Arabs travellers to India is Al-Masʿūdī, the famous geographer and historian, who is hailed as the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs.’ He was the first Arab writer to combine history and scientific geography in his works he notes :

According to Masudi, the BHARTIYA rulers ranked amongst top five rulers of the world: … ‘for’, he declares, ‘it was acknowledged amongst the Khosraws (kings) that wisdom comes from India.’ Elsewhere he writes, ‘… the king of BHARAT, which has with us the name of the kingdom of wisdom; for the Hindus have invented philosophy.

(Reference
1. Aloys Sprenger, El-Masudi’s Historical Encyclopaedia, entitled "Meadows of gold and mines of gems" : translated from the Arabic by Aloys Sprenger, (London: 1841);
2. H.M. Elliot and John Dowson, he History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period; by Sir H. M. Elliot; Edited by John Dowson; 8 vols. (London: 1867–77), Vol. I.
Version: 15 Nov. 2016)

[N.S Rajaram: Indians invented algebra, calling it bija-ganita. Greeks considered some special cases in number theory like Diophantine Equations, also known to the Indians. The cumbersome letter-based notation (like the later Roman numerals) did not lend itself to problems in algebra. The major Greek contributions were the concept of proof (known also to Indians) and above all the axiomatic method at which they excelled. The Arabs themselves never denied their indebtedness to the Hindus in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. They called their numbers ‘Hindu numerals’. As noted in the Editor’s Introduction, much of this took place in pre-Islamic Iran, especially under Khusro I.]

Interestingly, in conformity with Arabic tradition, these numerals were called HINDU all through the medieval and early renaissance periods in eurofags by their top scholars.Adelard of Bath (1116 – 1142 ad).Roger Bacon (1214 – 1292 ad).Leonardo Fibonacci (1170 – 1250 ad).said al-Andalus (1029 – 1070 ad).Ibn Ezra (11th century ad).Voltaire (1694 – 1778 ad).

Therefore quite naturally, prior to the crusades, europeans regarded the Arabs as knowledgeable. To learn mathematics, Gerbert turned to the Islamic Arabs in Cordoba, not to Greek Christian sources in Byzantium. (Hence, the numerals he imported are today known as “Arabic numerals” which came from Bharat and called Arqam Hindiya) So, the story of the Greek origins of all science did not exist in europe prior to the Crusades.

To be continued..

 

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The contrast between Arab wealth and european poverty.

The contrast between Arab wealth and european poverty must be regarded as a key cause of the crusades.
An increase in church wealth and power was the direct consequence of the crusades, which also helped to expand church influence into wealthier arab areas. This, then, was the real motive of the crusades, for political acts are best judged by the consequences—and not by professed intentions. In fact, to judge from the consequences, some diabolical planning went into the crusades, for, with each Crusade, won or lost, church wealth and power increased. Also, the church kept trying to expand its influence in arab areas even after the military failure of the later crusades.

From Toynbee’s historical perspective, then, the Crusades are best described as “barbarian incursions”.

So the arabs were the centre, and europe was the periphery, trying to break in. The conditions for these barbarian incursions were established with the disintegration of the Caliphate of Cordoba into small taifas (petty kingdoms) after a disastrous battle for succession around 1010. The weakness of these taifas made them easy targets. Toledo was one such taifa which now boasted the best library in europe. During the proto-crusades—probes which preceded the “official” crusades—Toledo and its magnificent library came under christian control in 1085.

The library of toledo.
This library, instead of being burnt, was preserved. By now, the usefulness of non-bible knowledge had been accepted at the high-est levels of the church—we saw how Gerbert imported Arabic numerals. The state agreed- King otto sent emissaries to Cordoba to gather knowledge. During the Crusades, secular knowledge was gathered with great difficulty by spies like Adelard of Bath (who travelled disguised as a moslem student and who was perhaps the first to translate the Elements from Arabic to Latin). If the dark
age of christendom began with the burning down of the Great Library of Alexandria, it ended with the mass translation of the Toledo library, from Arabic to Latin, starting in 1125ad.

The church now needed knowledge for another reason. As Pagan europe was converted to Christianity mainly by force. But force would not work with the Arabs who were stronger. For the novel strategy of conversion without force, the church needed knowledge. But how could the church square this sudden thirst for knowledge with its earlier calls for book-burning? At the peak of religious fanaticism how could the church publicly justify acquiring knowledge from the hated arab enemy?

Ever since state and church first came together, at the time of Constantine, eusebius, a church historian, had initiated the program of distorting history to promote church interests. His successor orosius, in his History Against the Pagans, made it amply clear that history was just another tool of soft power in the church’s armory. This technology of falsehood was now applied to “man-age” common perceptions. The story-line was simple the most retarded claim in the history of humankind

Which claimed it was the Greeks who did it. On this story, during the 600 years of the christian Dark Age, all that the Arabs did was to preserve Greek works, the rightful inheritors of which were the chosen people, the Christians of europe.

So as you all see —characterizing Arabs as mere carriers of knowledge, and Greeks as the creative fount—which made the (“Greek”) knowledge in Arabic books theologically acceptable in europe, and enabled the translated Arabic books to be used as university texts for centuries in europe. Arabs did not quite accept this story. In the 9th c., when the Arabs built the Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, they gathered knowledge from all over the world, including India, Persia and China. They certainly did not restrict themselves to Greek sources. The actions speak for themselves- the Arabs did not then
think that science was primarily a greek invention.

Greek and Roman difficulties with elementary arithmetic.

The non-textual evidence provides a good reason for this. More than deduction, science is based on quantitative calculation. But the Greeks lacked basic arithmetic skills needed for calculation.
The early Greek (Attic) system of representing numbers was worse even than Roman numerals. (We will use Roman numerals in the following examples, since they are better known.) Greek/Roman numerals are inefficient for two reasons. First they are clumsy: the small number 1788 requires 12 symbols, and is written as MDCCLXXXVIII.

This system is hopeless for large numbers, such as 1053, which the Buddha was asked to name (by an opponent, who sought to test his knowledge). The world might come to an end before one
finishes writing down this number in Roman numerals! The unavoidable inference is this: the Greeks and Romans used this primitive system of numeration just because they never en-countered large numbers, and never did the complex calculations required for astronomy and science. Conversely, when the need for such complex calculations arose in europe, first among the florentine merchants, and then among european navigators, Roman numerals were abandoned in favour of “Arabic numerals” which came straight from India. Can one get around this inefficiency by inventing names for larger numbers? No. Roman numerals are structurally inefficient: even the simplest sum needs an abacus. Try XIV + XVIII! To add two
numbers, say 1788 + 1832, one would first represent these numbers on the Roman abacus, using counters. For 1788, one would need 3 counters for I, 1 counter for V, 1 for the L, and so on, making a
total of 12 counters. Similarly, for 1832 (MDCCCXXXII) we need 10 counters. Pooling together these 22 counters, one now simplifies as follows. The 5 counters for I are replaced by 1 counter for V; the
2 counters for V are replaced by 1 counter for X; of the 7 counters for X that we now have, 5 are replaced by an L and 2 stay as they are. The two L’s are now replaced by a C; 5 C’s are replaced by a D; and 2 of the 3 D’s are replaced by an M. We now arrange the counters, starting with the M, to get MMMDCXX which is the
same thing as 3620. So this simple arithmetic problem which any child could do mentally today in a jiffy becomes a tedious task with Greek and Roman numerals.

Multiplication is more difficult. Shakespeare’s clown knows that 11 sheep give 28 pounds of wool which sells for a guinea. How much would he get for the wool from 1500 sheep? He “cannot do’t
without counters”.9 (We leave out subtraction and division as too difficult to explain!) The Greeks obviously could not have done science without properly knowing how to add and multiply.

To be continued.

 

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Bayt al hikmah and transmission to Greek texts.

Therefore, while the Arabs valued the “theology of Aristotle” for arithmetic, they turned to BHARAT, not to Greece. Arabs imported various Indian arithmetic texts, notably those of Aryabhata, Brah-
magupta and Mahavira. These were digested and transcreated in the Bayt al Hikma, by al Khwarizmi, and became famous as Algo-rismus after his Latinized name. These “Arabic numerals” use the
place-value system. That makes it easy to represent large numbers. It also makes arithmetic very easy through “algorithms”—the elementary techniques of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that everyone today learns in school. Although the Baghdad House of Wisdom was a landmark, it only accelerated a well-established tradition.

From the very beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate, the legendary Barmakids (from barmak = pramukh) of Persian-Buddhist origin, who were vazirs to the Abbasid Khalifas, had already instituted this system of importing knowledge from Persia and India. The Barmakids, in turn, were only continuing the earlier Persian tradition of gathering knowledge, and translating it into Persian (Pahlavi). This continuity is manifest through texts, such as the Indian PANCHATANTRA, which were translated into Arabic not from Sanskrit but from Pahlavi, along with other Persian books, such as
the “Arabian Nights” and the astronomy text called the Almagest.

Noticeably, the Almagest came to Baghdad from Persia, not Byzantium. Had this text then existed in Byzantium, it could easily have been sourced from there, for Byzantium was then an abject tributary of Baghdad.

In contrast to the extreme literal translations at Toledo, the Baghdad scholars despised blind copying (naql). Indeed, the House of Wisdom aimed to promote the exact opposite (aql,intelligent theology). So, they digested the substance and rewrote the text. The focus was on practical benefits, and not on maintaining historical sanctity; so, such texts accretively incorporated all knowledge then available to the “translator”. For example, the “Arabian Nights” acquired characters like Haroun al Rashid, and the Barmakids.
Further, whether or not any information flowed from Byzantium to Baghdad, we have solid evidence that information flowed from Baghdad to Byzantium. Thus, the PANCHATANTRA was further translated from Arabic into Greek.

This is an important example, because, unlike the origin of a scientific theory, which can be obfuscated, the Indian origin of the PANCHATANTRA is unquestionable. Therefore, the fact of this Arabic-to-Greek translation firmly establishes that knowledge flowed from Arabic to Greek texts. That was the natural direction of information flow, given the huge investment in knowledge that was made in Baghdad. Recognizing that 9th c. or later Greek texts are derived, not “original”, unhinges the entire strategy of glorifying the Greek.

To be continued.

 

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The earlier story of scientific knowledge.

Let us go a step further into the past. Initially, many texts in Baghdad came from Persia where the same practice of collecting world-knowledge was followed. But, even in Persia, knowledge of astronomy (translated as Zij-i-Shahryar) was imported from India.

This is another striking fact. The Persian king, Khusrau I, attached great significance to the enterprise of knowledge gathering. However, his Vizier went to India, not to Athens or Alexandria or Constantinople. This despite the fact that the very best Hellenic sources were directly available to Khusrau: the leading philosopher of the Roman empire, the people best acquainted with Hellenic knowledge, were physically present in his court, having sought refuge in Persia to escape the edicts of Justinian. Had any secular knowledge remained in the Roman empire, Khusrau could have easily got it, for the Roman king, Justinian, was paying him a hefty tribute for non-aggression. If Christian historians of the time are to be believed, Khusrau even included a clause regarding the treatment of philosophers, as part of the treaty with Justinian! If Khusrau nevertheless imported mathematics and astronomy from India, the available Greek tradition of mathematics and astronomy must have been inadequate and unsatisfactory. A later source, the 7th c. Syrian Christian, Severus Sebokht,14 although naturally partial to Greeks, nevertheless confirms this relative assessment of Indian and Greek astronomy, and attributes the superiority of Indian astronomy to the superior Indian methods of calculation.

To recapitulate, from the beginning of the christian Dark Age to the beginning of the Crusades, the story of the Greek origins of science was nowhere to be found. The Greeks could not have developed any science with their primitive system of numeration. They lacked the requisite quantitative skills—until Indian arithmetic through Arabic texts diffused among the Byzantine Greeks, from the 9th c.
The story of a Greek origin of Arabic books, thus, appropriated to europe all pre crusade knowledge which the Arabs and Persians had gathered from all over the world, and developed further.

The Great Library of Alexandria and its Origin.

Clearly, this story of the Hellenic origin of all worthwhile secular knowledge is contrary to commonsense: why should all knowledge have originated in one place? Myth proceeds by linking story to story, and the Hellenic story is linked to the Great Library of Alexandria—most Greek names associated with science are today traced to Alexandria (in Africa). But what was the source of the Alexandrian library? Over the centuries, no one seems to have asked this question, thereby promoting the belief—as an implicit postulate—that this library was of Greek origin. This is the other big lie on which the story of a Hellenistic origin of science was concocted. For what is the evidence for such a belief?

In fact, all the available evidence points in the opposite direction. The number of volumes in the Alexandrian library reportedly exceeded half a million. The tiny Greek city states, with small populations of a few thousand citizens, could hardly have produced books on this scale. The book technology then involved papyrus: a material made in Egypt, expensive to import, and even more expensive to maintain. Just the cost of the papyrus would have been staggering. Besides, how did they support the vast leisured class needed to produce and maintain books in such numbers? The Greek city-states were constantly engaged in petty warfare, so that every able-bodied person was conscripted, and very little leisure was available. Texts corroborate these straightforward non-textual considerations. Strabo says that Aristotle was the first “man” to have a library. Setting aside Strabo’s peculiar notion of “personhood”, the remark does tell us that prior to Alexander, there was no culture of books in Greece.

Now that plato says that prior to the Great Library there was no culture of science in Greece. At his trial, Socrates was charged with a great crime—the crime of declaring the moon to be a clod of earth. A death penalty was demanded just on that ground—that he did not worship the moon as a divinity! Socrates denied he was Anaxagoras.

Clearly, the Greeks customarily put to death anyone who dared to do anything remotely scientific in astronomy. This situation persisted until after the time of Alexander, for Aristotle too ran away from Athens for the same reason, viz., that he feared being put to death for dabbling in scientific books! How could such an intolerant and superstitious culture have produced any science?

The chief librarian of Alexandria read Bhartiya manuscripts a lot of them .

Herodotus, like other Greeks, travelled to Egypt for higher learning. He confirms that the Greeks aped the Egyptians, and that Greek gods were mostly imitations of Egyptian gods. (The Ionian Greeks, being a Persian colony, preferred to mimic Persian customs.) Alexander too paid obeisance to the Egyptian gods at Memphis. Alexandria itself was better known as the city of Serapis, a dual-purpose god originating from the Egyptian gods Osiris and Apis.

So, Greeks lacked science until the time of Alexander. On the other hand, the first catalogue of books in the Great Library was prepared by Callimachus at the beginning of Ptolemy II’s reign. So, the main corpus of the library was already in place by then. Such a vast library could hardly have been produced, in situ, during Ptolemy I’s reign. So, the unavoidable conclusion is that the Alexandrian library did not have a Greek origin.

Only one serious explanation fits the facts: the books in the Alexandrian library were produced by someone else, and Alexander obtained them as part of his war booty.This is recognizably similar to the way the Toledo library was obtained—as war booty—by the proto-crusaders. The older civilizations, such as Egypt, INDIA Persia, and Babylon, had been around for long enough, and had ample economic surplus to have produced books on the scale required for the Alexandrian library. The Zoroastrian Book of Nativities records that Alexander got books from Darius’ treasury translated, and burnt the originals. This part of Alexander’s booty, being bulky, it is natural to suppose that only a small part of it would have been transported back to Greece, to his mentor, Aristotle. But the bulk of the books were left behind in Alexandria.

There they lay neglected by Ptolemy I who was preoccupied with his petty wars. It was only at the beginning
of Ptolemy II’s reign that someone remembered this neglected treasure, and had it catalogued. Over time, vigorous attempts were made to expand the library by banning the export of papyrus, by forcibly acquiring all books entering the kingdom etc. Numerous books from Egypt and elsewhere were naturally added to this library. Some were presumably translated into Greek. This explanation fits into the general theory that information preferentially flows towards the military conqueror. The idea that military conquerors at the head of vast hordes, like Alexander or Hulegu, spread culture and science is a sorry attempt at glorification aimed at uncritical and gullible people. In both cases, these military conquerors spread destruction, but acquired culture, exactly as happened during the first Crusade. (The Greeks, too, were then on the periphery of the Persian empire, so Alexander’s conquests were just another case of such “barbarian incursions”.)

To be continued.

 

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The textual sources of the post-crusade story.

How did people hang on for so many centuries to the absurd theory of the hellenic origins of science? Of course, the theory suited the priests who so dominated western society for centuries. But, historiographically speaking, a key methodology was used to establish this implanted myth as theory.

The methodology was to rely entirely on textual evidence. This was seen as culturally correct in a scriptural culture: “if it is written it must be true”! The textual sources for this history are very late: at least a thousand years after the purported fact. The Latin texts are obviously all post-crusade texts derived from the Arabic. The Byzantine Greek texts (from Istanbul) are often from even later (as we shall see in the case of Copernicus). Even the earlier texts post-date the Baghdad library. By no stretch of imagination can these texts be construed as “original” Greek sources that they are often passed off as.

Only a process of wild speculation connects these late texts to purported “originals” in Alexandria, from a thousand years earlier. Non-textual evidence is contrary to these speculations. There is no continuous tradition of intervening texts connecting the actual texts to the conjectured “originals”. Most likely, the supposed “original” texts never existed, but even if they did, they cannot be reconstructed from the later-day texts which are accretive a scientific text had to be practically useful to survive, therefore it would be constantly updated.


For example, a navigator would record the current pole star, which is the matter of practical concern. (Due to a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, the axis of the earth precesses, like a spinning top. Therefore, the axis points to different points in the sky at different times, so the pole star changes with the epoch.) And, indeed, the current pole star heads the list found in the “original” Almagest text. However, the text is attributed to a Claudius Ptolemy of the 2nd c., when this star pointed 12o away from the north pole! From the 2nd through the 9th c. its companion star [Ursa Minor β], an equally bright star, better indicated north. Obviously, this sort of textual evidence from late and accretive sources is evidence of very poor quality. On the other hand, the priests, who wrote history based on such texts, were masters in the art of manipulating poor-quality textual evidence, and using such manipulation to promote the most absurd beliefs contrary to elementary common sense.

To be continued.

 

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Let us take a few concrete examples to show how this worked.

Hoax of Euclid: Geometry and Mathematics : The so called father of geometry did not exist.


We saw that even Needham (Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science & Civilisation in China (abridgment
by Colin A. Ronan), Cambridge University Press, 1981, vol. 2, p. 43.) thought that real mathematics and science began with deduction, a tradition supposedly started by Euclid. But what exactly do we know about Euclid? One authority, the late David Fowler, gave a succinct answer: “Nothing”. However, other historians insist that the right answer is “almost nothing”. Let us decide between these two possibilities!

Euclid supposedly wrote a key geometry text called the Elements. Naturally, people suppose (on the strength of the story) that the name “Euclid” is found in front of manuscripts of the Elements. But that is not true. As Thomas Heath, the leading authority on “Euclid”, points out, “All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago...purport in their titles to be either ‘from the edition of Theon’...or ‘from the lectures of Theon’ ”. The name “Euclides” is associated with the Elements only in post-Crusade Latin texts of the Elements. This is derived from the Arabic “uclides” which means “key to geometry”! (The Toledo translations were done by two sets of people through an intermediate language: the Mozarabs who knew Arabic but not the subject nor any Latin, and the “official” translator who knew Latin, but not the subject nor the original language. Howlers, therefore, were common.) Thus, the “almost nothing” that we supposedly know about “Euclid” is based on a passage from another text: the Commentary on the Elements by Proclus. As Heath further points out, Greek commentaries “commonly speak of the writer of the Elements instead of using his name”.

This particular isolated passage not only names Euclid, but also attributes to him a philosophy of mathematics that is strikingly at variance with the Neoplatonic philosophy that the rest of Proclus’ book advocates. It should be recalled that Neoplatonic philosophy was declared heretical and cursed by the church. However, the new philosophy of “irrefragable demonstration” attributed to Euclid in this passage fitted remarkably well with post-crusade christian theology and its needs.

As a source for Euclid, the passage is not reliable, for it states that no earlier historian of geometry mentioned Euclid during the 800 years that separate Proclus from the purported date of Euclid!

The passage is an interpolation. First the manuscript of Proclus’ book is on paper, and hence dates to after the 13th c., when paper became common in eurofags, some eight centuries after Proclus. Second, it claims that Archimedes cites Euclid. Such a citation (of the Elements, not Euclid) is indeed found in a manuscript attributed to Archimedes (Sphere and the Cylinder), but actually coming from some 1800 years after his date. This citation has been regarded as spurious for two reasons. First, such citations were not the custom in Archimedes’ time. Second, the citation is isolated, though there are numerous opportunities in the book where similar citations could have been made.

Since the author of the “Proclus” passage knew of this late interpolation in the “Archimedes” manuscript, the “Proclus” passage must be a later interpolation. People seem unaware that it is on this sort of “evidence” from late and accretive texts that the grand claims about Euclid derive. Understandably, the evidence for lesser names (or their linkages to the works they supposedly authored) is much weaker.At about this point, many people jump up to say that they don’t really care about the person Euclid, and it is the book called the
Elements which ultimately matters. This is a facile escape route. If Euclid is a concoction, the Elements might have had a non-Hellenic origin in the mystery geometry of pre-Alexandrian Egypt. In that case, it could be better understood as contrary to post-crusade Christian rational theology. The same conclusion applies even if we accept seriously the Neoplatonic philosophy of geometry, as articulated by plato or by Proclus in his Commentary on the Elements. So, accepting Euclid as a concoction also entails a different understanding of the Elements, and amounts to denying the appropriation of reason by the church.Such a denial would alter the present-day philosophy of mathematics,and the idea of deduction as fundamental to science.

To be continued.

 

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Let us now turn to astronomy.

Ptolemy: Astronomy and trigonometry.

Predictably, a Hellenic origin is assigned to astronomy. This is based on a key astronomy text, the
almagest. Prior to the Crusades (and even for centuries after it), this text was attributed to “ptolemy”, in the loose sense that it was thought to be coming down from ancient ptolemaic times. Such an understanding, permitting its possible Egyptian roots, would render it useless today to the agenda of western glorification.Therefore, today, this text is attributed to a person with another strange name, claudius ptolemy, who supposedly lived in Alexandria in the 2nd c. ce (but was supposedly unrelated to the ptolemy dynasty).

This date is based on four short passages from a very late (post-12th c.) text, passed off as the “original” greek source. Nothing else is known about this ptolemy, nor is it necessary; it is the Greek-sounding name, and the sharp date that is critical to claims of Hellenic priority!

Now, we have already seen proof that the almagest is accretive - its star list is headed by the present-day pole star 27 which was not the pole star in the 2nd c. So, new material was added from after the 9th c. There are many other examples to show the accretive nature of the text. Arab astronomers initially had difficulties with the Indian arithmetic algorithms. So, the islameic zijes of the 9th c. were typically accompanied by elaborate multiplication tables. And sure enough the almagest speaks of the “difficulty with multiplication”. Yet, and though it has the wrong length of the year, the almagest states some parameters to the 8th sexagesimal minute (or 14 places after the decimal point).


The very name of the text, almagest, is Arabic, and shows that it passed through the Baghdad House of Wisdom. The Arabic version was translated not from Greek but from Pahlavi—the text starts
off by addressing an unknown Cyrus—presumably since it was created in Persia, in the 6th c.Selecting a few textual passages to date an accretive text is a faulty procedure. However, such passages in the almagest are unreliable for a less obvious reason. Every single purported observation in the almagest is a fake, and has been obtained by back-calculation!

Look at newton’s careful analysis of the almagest ruled out all possible sources of natural observational error; the only hypothesis that fitted, and fitted accurately, was that of back calculation. Since the purported “observations” in the almagest are all fake, and these passages were put in later, they are absolutely useless for the purpose of dating the text. The authoritative texts are unable to justify their faulty procedure, and unable to meet newton’s cogent arguments, except through adjectives—a dead give-away of a motivated and dishonest approach. The Roman calendar provides non-textual evidence which conflicts with the date assigned to Ptolemy. Thus, the roman calendar used the incorrect figure of 365 ¼ days for the length of the year. Now those romans counted a year as the time from equinox to equinox; known as the tropical year this is actually 365.24(2199) days. The error in the second place after the decimal point was deplorable even by the standards of the 3rd c. BHARTIYA calendar. So this roman calendar lost one day in a century because of this error which remained in it until the 1582 gregorian calendar reform (which decreed that every hundredth year would not be a leap year).


The erroneous round figure of 365 ¼ days was used in the roman calendar just because the romans had difficulties in representing fractions—there is no stock way to represent fractions with roman
numerals. Consequently, only some fractions were in common use; these had special names, and ¼ was one such fraction.

Now, one of the key passages used to date our claudius ptolemy recognizes that the figure of 365 ¼ is erroneous. The author of this passage believed that the true length of the year is 1 day in 300 years less than 365 ¼ days. (This is erroneous; a better figure is 1 day less in 128 years.) In this passage in the almagest, the (fake) “observations” of equinox are back-calculated on this erroneous belief.


Since the passage was put in later, it should not be used to date ptolemy. But if the passage is somehow contended to be genuine, then the roman calendar should have adopted this length of the
year since the 2nd c. At least that should have happened in the 4th c. when the council of Nicea met to fix the date of easter. (Now this easter or Pascha is a “moveable” feast, since it depends upon the full moon, and the lunar cycle is incommensurate with the solar cycle. The Roman calendar is a simple count of civil days, and had abandoned all attempts to relate phases of the moon to months. Thus, months, on the Roman calendar, idiosyncratically have 30 or 31 days and sometimes 28 or 29 days.) Therefore, the complex task of fixing the date of easter was referred to the learned philosophers of Alexandria, who ought to have consulted ptolemy’s book if it then existed.The wrong length of the year would have caused the date of easter to slip within a century, and further reform of the roman calendar were actually initiated during the 5th and 6th c. At least these reformers should have adopted ptolemy’s revised (but still erroneous figure) had this text been around at that time. They did not; the passage is a fake, as is the date assigned to ptolemy and the almagest text.

Theologians and fabricators of history use a stock technique to get around such insurmountable difficulties. Each new difficulty is countered by a new speculative hypothesis. This way of accumulating hypotheses can be used to defend any story, howsoever absurd. It is exactly like the process where one lie is defended by
inventing a thousand more. For example, the almagest has many similarities with Indian astronomy texts. (The Almagest planetary models, though similar, are certainly not identical with Indian models. However, some general arguments in Book 1 sound like a paraphrase of controversies in Indian astronomy.) This is easily understood as due to accretion since we know that Indian astronomy texts travelled to Jundishapur and Baghdad, where this Indian knowledge got mixed with the almagest.

However, this simple and pragmatic explanation by accretion would defeat the objective of the grand narrative: for Hellenic glorification demands a “pure Greek” origin of all knowledge. Therefore, to hang on to the fabricated story, two new hypotheses are invented. First, the Indian controversies are related to some Greek names dodgier than Ptolemy.30 Second, it is claimed that Ptolemaic astronomy was transmitted to India. This is the stock position adopted by history texts and encyclopedias today: they also claim that trigonometry was invented by Greeks (meaning Ptolemy) and then transmitted to India.There is, of course, no serious evidence for such transmission, as there is for the trans-mission in the reverse direction via accretion. But unreliable textual evidence, and infinitely many speculative hypotheses that don't hold any water.

Certainly a channel for information transmission existed between India and Alexandria from early times. But this could have transmitted information either way. Ashok the Great’s stone edicts record how Buddhist monks, carrying texts, and medicinal plants “for men and animals”, were sent to Alexandria (at the time of Ptolemy II).

So, from the very beginnings of the Great Library of Alexandria, BHARTIYA knowledge did travel to Alexandria. Over-reliance on texts also conveniently delinks history from material factors.

In India a calendar was (and still is) vital to an economy driven by rain-fed agriculture. The Indian calendar correctly identifies the rainy season (the months of Sawan and Bhadon, celebrated in Indian songs). A good calendar was then also needed for (celestial) navigation, for overseas trade was another key source of wealth in India.

Thus, as noted by Pliny, goods imported from India annually drained a significant part of the wealth of the roman empire and the heavier items, such as Indian elephants and ebony were easier to transport by the sea route. As for Greeks, however, had no such material need for a calendar, beyond a simple count of civil days. Therefore, the Greek calendar was so hopeless, that the Greek calenders were the butt of jokes even among the romans (who themselves had such a defective calendar).

Do note that the Greeks knew little navigation. Some of alexander’s soldiers, who elected to return via the sea route from India, had never been out on the open sea before, and were frightened to see the spout of a whale!

Therefore, unlike Indians, Greeks and romans had little motivation to do astronomy.Yet another way to cross-check matters is to examine the process of development. In India, we can see the slow and realistic progress of astronomy towards greater accuracy.

The 5th c. ARYABHATTA’s trigonometric values were accurate to the first minute. Accuracy was improved to the second minute by the time of the 9th c. Vatesvara, and to the third minute (8th decimal place) by the 14th c. Madhava. The whole process took nearly a thousand years.

In contrast, ptolemy arrives full blown, though he recognizes no predecessor other than hipparchus, from 285 year earlier. Just then almagest, conveniently disappears, equally suddenly, without a trace in the roman calendar. Such sudden appearance and disappearance, and absence of process, is characteristic of magic and fairy tales.

So this ptolemy was clearly fabricated after the crusades. While the euclid and ptolemy did not exist some Greek authors obviously did.

However, given the large-scale fraud in which western distorians have engaged, the mere historical existence of some persons, such as aristotle, should not be taken as convincing proof that they authored or initiated the texts attributed to them. Thus, Arabs attributed many neoplatonic texts to aristotle.These attributions (which made “aristotle” theologically incorrect in europe) were also rejected by so called western scholars.

However, it is equally unlikely that the texts on Logic and Physics, today attributed to aristotle, were written by the historical aristotle, or even by a group of translators operating under his name, in his general time period. The cases of ptolemy and euclid were taken up only to illustrate the kind of “evidence” for the grand narrative of a hellenic origin of science. Obviously, this entire narrative, developed over centuries, cannot be refuted on a case-by-case basis in a few thousand words, and it is not necessary to do so.

To be continued...

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Continued from[] https://defenceforumindia.com/threads/science-is-not-western-in-origin.83031/post-2051368

The inquisition and religious intolerance.
Let us now move on to the second phase of history-fabrication, which concerns the inquisition and the general atmosphere of religious intolerance that then prevailed in europe. The two key scientific developments in this time period are known as the copernican revolution and the newtonian revolution.

The copernican revolution.
On the stock story, ptolemy’s geocentric planetary model, which survived for 13 centuries, was displaced by copernicus’ heliocentric model. This entailed an “upheaval in astronomical thought that we call the Copernican Revolution”. Kuhn adds that “Copernicus...first revived the full hellenistic tradition of mathematical astronomy”.

Notice how this stock story respects the unstated postulate of western historiography that all knowledge must have a theologically correct origin. Except for ptolemy (Greek) and copernicus (european), all others are pushed to the margins.

We have already seen that the first part of this story is false - ptolemy is just a convenient name used for hellenistic appropriation via an accretive text. In fact astronomy was continuously modified. Let us now look at the second part of the story.

The shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism is supposedly the revolutionary idea proposed by copernicus in the 15th c. Strangely enough, even the 11th c. al Biruni, while describing BHARTIYA astronomical theories, discusses whether the observed motion of the stars is real or relative. He points out that this is irrelevant for astronomy, since both models lead to identical conclusions. He is right, of course: mathematically speaking, one has only to add or subtract the earth-sun displacement vector to move from one model to another. Furthermore, it is always necessary to transform to a geocentric model for comparison with observations.

Delhi poet Khusrau 13th ad seems more excited about heliocentrism when he asks, “Who has seen the sun moving?” Aryabhata certainly stirred a hornet’s nest when he asserted that the earth moves, and that the stars only appear to move “like the stationary objects on the river-bank as seen from a moving boat”.Varahamihira, and then Brahmagupta, came down heavily on Aryabhata for this claim, the latter derogatorily referring to him as bhata (a pun on bhatta intended to emphasize Aryabhata’s low caste, hence ignorance). Even many of Aryabhata’s followers were apologetic on this point (and it made no material difference).

The entire controversy is paraphrased at the beginning of the almagest. Of course, the moment these precursors of heliocentrism are mentioned, chauvinistic western distorians jump to attach to the idea a greek name - in this case aristarchus of Samos. They will point to a stray remark from one 14th c. Greek manuscript sup-ported by another stray remark in another 15th c. manuscript to fix a date—but we know all that stuff by now. What is needed is a revolutionary shift away from this helleno-centrism!


Setting aside heliocentrism, copernicus’ other contribution is his mathematical model. Surprisingly, for a revolutionary innovator, this is a carbon copy of an earlier astronomical model by Ibn-as-Shatir of Damascus (d. 1375).

Ibn Shatir used a technique due to nasiruddin Tusi (whose advice to Hulegu led to the downfall of
Baghdad, and who was rewarded with the Maragha observatory). The Maragha school raised new questions, and offered novel solutions. Copernicus mimics both the questions and answers. Copernicus’ “lunar model is identical to Ibn ash-Shatir’s...The question therefore is not whether, but when, where, and in what form he learned of Maragha theory.”It is known that a Byzantine Greek translation of Ibn Shatir’s work was available in the vatican library, and that copernicus knew Greek. Copernicus even transliterates Tusi’s notation. Many contemporaries of copernicus were familiar with various Arabic astronomy texts; they imported them and read them directly from Arabic, as we can see from their annotations on these manuscripts.


Copernicus, a priest, was naturally concerned about theological correctness; but, in those days of the inquisition, he also feared church persecution. His close friend and fellow canon, scultetus, was named a heretic and underwent ten years of trial, imprisonment, and torture in Rome.

Understandably this copernicus prudently waited until he was on his deathbed, before sending the book for publication. Also, he stated that his theory did not depict reality, but was only a hypothesis. That copernicus had no revolutionary intentions is made further clear by the “grovelling” preface to his book, addressed to pope paul III, in which copernicus cites in his favour various religious authorities, including two bishops, one cardinal, and a previous pope. (Of course, one can “save” the grand story of a revolutionary by introducing a new hypothesis that someone else wrote the preface, and so on.)


The key questions, however, have never been asked - could copernicus have openly acknowledged his islamic sources? Had he done that, wouldn’t someone have denounced him as a heretic?
Would that have helped his case for theological correctness? So, copernicus followed the tradition in which he used arab sources, but refused to acknowledge them.
How have western historians reacted to this resounding crash of a fabricated revolution? How have they reacted to this crash in the sustained western enterprise of glorification?

This is Owen Gingerich’s response:“some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached rome in the 15th century... but there is no evidence that copernicus ever saw it. . . . I personally believe he could have invented the method independently.”

That’s it! Such a striking coincidence would be nothing short of a miracle, but westerners routinely perform such miracles hoax!

They have the big magic of claiming “independent rediscovery” through quibbles! There is precedence, obviously; the similarity is undeniable; the text was in a library which copernicus visited, these Arabic models were known to his colleagues, copernicus transliterates Tusi’s notation, but we are required to furnish further proof that copernicus actually saw those texts in the library. Why is further proof required? Because the standards of evidence have just been changed to preserve the crumbling story. This method of unreasonably sharpening the standards of evidence is an old trick when the rainmaker knows he can’t make rain, so he demands a monkey without a blemish.

Note a further, subtle way in which the rules of evidence are being juggled. The appropriate standard of evidence for history is balance of probabilities, and there is ample circumstantial evidence that copernicus model was entirely derived.

So, the onus of proof is on western shitstoryans to supply solid evidence that copernicus did not see the text! Instead, they shift the onus of proof, and demand further evidence!

So, the greatcopernican revolution is better called the great copernican Quibble!

Copernicus was not an isolated case. Mercator was arrested by the inquisition, and in grave danger of being tortured to death in a painful way. As Needham shows, the famous “mercator projection” was already used in Chinese star maps of the 10th c. T

The construction of mercator’s map needed precise trigonometric values—readily available from BHARAT.

But the sources of this famous map (stock “map of the world”), so critical to european navigation, could not be uncovered in all these years. Fearful of the inquisition, mercator hid his pagan sources. (Had his sources been theologically correct, he would not have needed to hide them.)

High officials of the church made other such “independent rediscoveries” by hiding their real sources. For example, tycho whose “tychonic” model was identical with NEELKANTHA’s (1501) planetary model. The roman catholic missionaries, in Cochin from 1500, had easy access to Neelkantha’s work.

Similar remarks apply to tycho’s contemporary christoph clavius who authored the gregorian calendar reform and published elaborate trigonometric tables. These cases are not exhaustive. They only illustrate a general phenomenon as the systematic fabrication of history through claims of “independent rediscovery”.

These retarded europeans made “discoveries” in exactly the sense that vasco da gama or columbus made “discoveries”—by the simple process of declaring as non-persons all those who were theologically incorrect.

“Doctrine of christian Discovery” was initiated by 15th c. papal bulls, it was fully accepted by protestant countries, as the amreekan supreme court pointed out, while granting it legal sanctity. Later-day western distorians then made this into a “Doctrine of Independent Rediscovery”!

To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Continued from []https://defenceforumindia.com/threads/science-is-not-western-in-origin.83031/post-2051368
(We should note one thing the laws of motion were known to BHARTIYA people, many many centuries before newton, in VAISHESHIKA SUKTA viz Sage VAISHESHIK)



Hoax of newton and the calculus.

From the dubious “copernican revolution”, let us move on to the greater “newtonian revolution”. It is difficult to explain everything here in a few short paragraphs, but those who follow the references (recursively) should eventually be able to understand my argument. (References at the end of core arguments) please cope.Now back to topic.

Yeah so first, what was actually this newton’s key achievement in physics? Earlier planetary models took uniform circular motion as the norm.

In BHARAT this was done not for any metaphysical reasons, but simply because that is what one actually sees the vast majority of heavenly bodies doing. The norm requires no explanation. What required explanation was the departure from the norm. The planets, including the sun and the moon, were counted as seven (corresponding to the days of the week) and exhibited irregularities, today known as the zodiacal anomaly and retrograde motion. BHARTIYA planetary models aimed to calculate planetary positions in agreement with empirical observations. For Arabic models, too, the key concern was agreement with empirical observation, not metaphysics.

Later-day europeans, however, took uniform straight-line motion as the norm not requiring explanation. This idea (“newton’s first law”) is purely metaphysical and geometrical, and not based on any observation. It cannot be, for it is unlikely that such uniform motion in a straight line ever takes place anywhere in the cosmos (or that any inertial frame actually exists). Also this newton explicitly admitted this at the beginning of his principia. If metaphysical considerations nevertheless prevailed in newtonian physics, it was because of his religious beliefs—he thought that jewish sky daddy had created a mathematically-correct cosmos.

On this metaphysical norm of straight-line motion, circular motion did require explanation; and it could be
explained by postulating an inverse-square law force. This way of explaining circular motions, by postulating a force, was well known to newton’s contemporaries, such as hooke. What they did not know was how to extend this explanation to the case of elliptic planetary orbits. So this newton’s key achievement
was his use of a new mathematical technique—the calculus—to extend the idea of the inverse-square-law force to elliptic orbits. This mathematical technique is the substance of newton me-
chanics in which every problem is reducible to the solution of ordinary differential equations. This achievement must be seen in its proper context.

BHARTIYA planetary models had used epicycles with variable radii, corresponding to elliptic planetary orbits. Calculations related to these orbits used the calculus. This process was initiated by ARYABHATTA in the 5th c., when he switched from clumsy geometrical methods to an elegant numerical technique to calculate trigonometric values with great facility. ARYABHATTA’s technique is essentially equivalent to what is today called “eulers” method of numerically solving ordinary differential equations (the content of newtonian mechanics).

How was the calculus transmitted from India well the calculus was transmitted out of BHARAT viz SANKARA VARIYAR , who expounded NEELKANTHA’s work, shared a patron, the Raja of Cochin, with the portuguese who started the first Indian roman catholic mission in Cochin in 1500. Then these portuguese soon set up a school to indoctrinate the local syrian christians, with whom they had formed a strategic alliance, in line with their “prester john strategy” for winning the crusades.


By about 1550 this school, now a college, was taken over by the jesuits. They made it into another toledo, acquiring and translating a variety of Indian texts, and transmitting them back to rome. For this purpose, they used the syrian christians, much as they had the mozarabs in toledo, but they also employed BRAHMINS as translators.

Some texts of the “Kerala school” were also available in the local language Malayalam, the mother tongue of the syrian christians, and this was a language that jesuits were teaching to them in their Cochin college. There was ample motivation for europeans to acquire the Indian calculus techniques. The stupid european navigation problem was then the foremost scientific problem in europe, for it held the key to the european dream of wealth through overseas trade. Many governments offered huge rewards for its solution. Also the european navigators depended on charts, and the construction of the mercator chart needed a precise table of secants. Precise trigonometric values were, thus, of great concern to european navigational theorists during the 16th c. The most precise trigonometric values then (precise to 8 decimal places) were in BHARTIYA texts, and were derived using the calculus.


At first, the retarded jesuits did not know any mathematics. However, christoph clavius altered the jesuit syllabus in rome, inserting practical mathematics into it, a subject on which he wrote a text. Matteo Ricci was in the first batch of these jesuit students so trained in mathematics, and he was further trained in navigation at coimbra before being despatched to India.


Visiting Cochin, just before gregorian calendar reform authored by clavius, he wrote that he was looking for “an intelligent BRAHMAN or an honest Moor” to explain to him BHARTIYA methods of timekeeping.

(The precise trigonometric values etc., were found in BHARTIYA timekeeping or calendrical works.) Noticeably, although Clavius published elaborate trigonometric tables he did not know enough trigonometry to use it to determine the size of the earth, a critical parameter for longitude determination on celestial navigation.

So this tycho brahe, the royal astronomer to the holy roman empire, was the other person to whom these Indian manuscripts would logically have been sent, so it is little wonder that “tycho’s” planetary model is identical with NEELKANTHA’s.

Do note that tycho’s masonry instruments were far too inaccurate, and built far too late, for him to have arrived at his model independently. After death of tychos (or murder), his assistant, kepler, decamped with tycho’s secret papers, to which tycho had earlier denied him access despite all his efforts.

The nearly-blind kepler could hardly have carried out the observations required for the phenomenal accuracy of his orbit of Mars; Neelkantha had obtained this accuracy after 50 years of observation.

Do note that kepler’s explanation for this oddity is not credible, especially since, being an astrologer by profession, he was either a very bad scientist (if he believed in astrology), or accustomed to spinning stories for the gullible (if he did not believe in astrology, but nevertheless made a living from it).

However, the calculus was not readily comprehended by retarded europeans because their understanding of mathematics as “perfect” differed culturally from the Indian understanding. As for kepler, he tried but failed. Objecting to the use of the calculus by fermat and pascal, descartes thought it required supertasks (an infinite series of tasks). He declared this was “beyond the capacity of the human mind”.

So when galileo concurred, and, after five years of vacillation, he left it to his student cavalieri to take the credit or discredit. Many others reproduced the Indian infinite series (always without acknowledging the pagan sources, as was the norm in europe). It was in this context that newton claimed that his theory of fluxions gave a “rigorous” account of the calculus. (As Berkeley showed, newton was mistaken in thinking thus, and today the supertasks required for formal real numbers, and limits are pushed into set theory.)So, this, then, must be seen as newton’s primary mathematical achievement - he made (or was widely believed to have made) the calculus compatible with european metaphysics. As was done with geometry, post-crusade, newton theologically sanitised the calculus. In any case, he made the calculus acceptable to most europeans. Incidentally, this had a curious effect on newton’s physics. We have already seen that newton’s first “law” of motion is metaphysical, and, so, indeed, is the second law—at best it provides a definition of force. This, however, is not a good definition, since the right hand side involves a derivative with respect to time. In his attempt to make the calculus “rigorous”, newton made time metaphysical hence his principia begins with a reference to “absolute, true, and mathematical time” which flows on “without relation to anything external”.

In making time “mathematical”, newton took a step back, from his predecessor, barrow, who had tried to keep it physical. Remedying this critical lacuna about time in Newton’s physics led to the special theory of relativity. General relativity, as is well known, abandons the concept of force. But this newton, however, was undoubtedly a great scholar. His fifty years of biblical scholarship, uncovering a systematic process of fraud and misinterpretation, could easily have sparked a real revolution had it not been suppressed, as it remains to this day.

To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Continued from []https://defenceforumindia.com/threads/science-is-not-western-in-origin.83031/post-2051411

Racism and colonialism.

To summarize, euclid the geometer and ptolemy the astronomer were pure fabrications, like the stories of the copernican and newtonian revolutions. And these are just examples of what was obviously a largescale and systematic effort, spread over centuries. Thus, the western history of science during the crusades and the inquisition followed orosian principles - it aimed to propagate falsehoods to glorify the west and belittle all others. This goal admirably suited racism and colonialism which followed after this and partly because of this.Much has already been written on how history was concocted during this period.

So apart from emphasizing the continuity of this third phase with the first two phases (during crusades andinquisition), I add only a few new points.

The first point concerns the “doctrine of independent rediscovery”, used to “save the story” of copernicus, and newton.

There are a host of other such cases. So we can either understand the history of science as a series of systematic miracles frauds, which took place in the west, or accept systematic fraud in western history-writing. Second, changing the rules of the game in mid-story exposes the double standards of evidence—the hallmark of racist history. Thus, for the long-standing claim that trigonometry and greek astronomy was transmitted to India, the conjectured precedence of ptolemy is regarded as adequate proof of transmission (dis-counting the simpler explanation of accretion in the Almagest).

However, in cases of copernicus or newton actual precedence is not proof enough. The story dictates which rule will be followed. So, western distorians implicitly stipulate that the standard of evidence required to prove a claim of transmission to copernicus or newton is different from the standard of evidence they earlier used for a claim of transmission from ptolemy. Racist history is the only possible outcome of such insane hypocritical standards.

There is another subtler trick. As we saw above, the elements not only acquired a theologically-correct origin, it also acquired a theologically-correct interpretation. Both this plato and neoplatonists had linked geometry and mathematics to the soul. The revised interpretation rejected this linkage as heretical. Mathematics was reinterpreted as “a universal means of compelling argument”. This reinterpretation suited the post-crusade agenda of converting arabs without using force or scripture. After many centuries, the interpretation became so well entrenched, that even atheists like russell promoted it. This was given final shape by hilbert and is taught in schools today.

This is not a valid interpretation of the Elements, since it fails to apply beyond the 35th proposition of the
Elements.

Nevertheless, it has the support of those in authority.This modified understanding of the Elements is now asserted to be the essence of mathematics. This allows rouseball or needham to claim mathematics as unique to the west. The modified philosophy retrospectively modifies history. This is much like henry higgins asking in the film adaptation of shaw’s pygmalion, “Why can’t a woman be more like me!” It amounts to saying that anything that does not mimic the west, is, by definition, not science; ergo, science is a creation of the west! Note how theology has crept in: we are asked to believe that science is about deducing the consequences of some “laws” instituted by a god who created the cosmos, as has been made out in the west since newton.

Science is actually about building models and calculating their empirical consequences. Nature need have no laws.Nevertheless, the above trick of demanding mimicry continues to be applied today with regard to the calculus. It took centuries for europe to absorb the Indian calculus after adapting it. The original is now faulted on the grounds that it does not mimic newton’s (incorrect) understanding of the calculus, or its present-day dominant understanding the west, which requires supertasks, limits, and a proof of a “fundamental theorem of calculus” using these.

Be it noted that all this ritualistic paraphernalia is perfectly useless for any practical application of the calculus, for which one still needs to calculate. These calculations can still be done by (appropriate improvements of) Aryabhata’s numerical technique of solving ordinary differential equations.

We can see more clearly the effect of applying one set of cultural filters, by applying an alternative set of cultural filters to western thought. Formal mathematics crumbles if it is interrogated from a Buddhist perspective. Present day mathematical theorems are deduced by naively presupposing two-valued logic; the use of BHARTIYA Buddhist logic would make them erroneous. The realist philosophy of SHOONYAVAAD would also declare the idealisations of platonism (e.g. a geometrical point) as erroneous, and the “erroneous” practical “approximations” (e.g. dot on a piece of paper) to be the only real thing we have. The supertasks that set theory performs metaphysically, would, of course, have to be rejected, as in computer arithmetic, together with notions such as formal real numbers, and limits. Thus, all that we are left with are the mundane practical procedures, with no bunkum claims about how science captures the laws of any particular god.

Concluded..

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Continued from []https://defenceforumindia.com/threads/science-is-not-western-in-origin.83031/post-2051439

References :

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Was Euclid A Black Woman? Sorting Through The False History And Bad Philosophy Of Mathematics :
Author : CK RAJU.

President Elect, Indian Social Science Academy, 2017-18, Research Professor, AlBukhary University, Visiting Professor School of Math, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Distinguished Professor and Director (Academic) Inmantec, Delhi, Professor and Head, School of Computer Sciences, National University of Journalism, Bhopal, etc. Editorial Fellow, Centre for Studies in Civilizations



A false history of science was used to initiate colonial education, in support of colonialism. This false history persists. In a recent article about decolonizing mathematics, for instance, Professor Karen Brodie asserts that, “Much, though certainly not all, of mathematics was created by dead white men.”
This is not true.

A false history
Consider the most elementary mathematics of fractions. Did the white man invent it? No. The Rhind papyrus shows that black Egyptians knew about fractions from at least 3,700 years ago. Moreover, Greeks and Romans did not: there is no systematic way to represent fractions in traditional Greek and Roman arithmetic. Europe imported the arithmetic of fractions, and it came into the Jesuit syllabus only around 1572, and the white man finally started learning what Ahmose the scribe was teaching black children 3,000 years earlier.

What mathematics could “dead white men” have created without even a knowledge of fractions?

Of course, western historians have long claimed that “real” maths was invented by Greeks: Pythagoras, Euclid and so on. However, Pythagoras is myth and there is no historical evidence for Euclid, as I’ve explained in my book Euclid and Jesus.

The “evidence” for Euclid is so thin, that I’ve instituted a challenge prize of around R40,000 for serious evidence about Euclid. This stands unclaimed and has done for several years.

Further, though the text Elements (which Euclid supposedly wrote) comes from Alexandria in Africa, its author is commonly visualised as a white man. But it is rather more likely that the anonymous “author of the Elements” was a black woman.

When this is pointed out, some people try to save the myth: they say they don’t care about the author, only the book. However, it is another false western myth that the book Elements is about deductive proofs. The actual book contains no pure deductive proofs. Its very first proposition is proved empirically, as is its fourth proposition (the side angle side theorem), needed for the proof of its penultimate proposition (“Pythagorean proposition”).

Deductive proof doesn’t lead to valid knowledge
Stripping off the false history exposes the central philosophical claim: that “real” math is about deductive proofs which are infallible and lead to “superior” knowledge. However, that claim too is false: deductive proofs are fallible. So an invalid deductive proof can be easily mistaken for a valid one. For centuries, the most authoritative western scholars collectively made this mistake, when they wrongly praised “Euclid’s” Elements as a model of deductive proof.

Worse, even a validly proved mathematical theorem is only an inferior sort of knowledge, since we never know whether it is valid knowledge. For example, the “Pythagorean theorem” is not valid knowledge for triangles drawn on the curved surface of the earth. However, Europeans kept applying the “Pythagorean theorem” to such triangles to determine latitude and longitude on their navigational technique of “dead reckoning”. This led to centuries of navigational disasters and made navigation – and determination of longitude – the key scientific challenge for Europeans from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

In fact, a mathematical theorem need have no relation at all to valid knowledge. For example, we can easily prove as a mathematical theorem that a rabbit has two horns:

1. All animals have two horns.
2. A rabbit is an animal.
3. Therefore, a rabbit has two horns.

This is a valid deductive proof, but is the conclusion valid?

Mere deductive proof does not lead to valid knowledge. We must check whether the assumptions are true. In this case the assumptions are false: simply point to an animal which has no horns. However, formal math forbids such commonsense, empirical proofs, based on its central dogma that deductive proofs are “superior”.

Anyway, the postulates of formal mathematics, say set theory, cannot be empirically checked. So formal mathematics is pure metaphysics. The only way to check its assumptions is to rely on authority – and in practice we teach only those postulates approved by western authority. For example, calculus is done with formal real numbers (and not Indian non-Archimedean arithmetic, or floating point numbers used in computer arithmetic). School geometry is taught using Hilbert’s far-fetched synthetic postulates, not Indo-Egyptian cord geometry.

A slave mentality
Thus, formal mathematics creates a slave mentality. It creates a person who blindly relies on western authority and conflates it with infallible truth. So finding better ways of inculcating that slave mentality – teaching the same maths but differently, as Brodie proposes in her article – is absolutely the last thing we should do.

False claims of “superiority” are a trick to impose western authority, exactly as in apartheid. Everyone understands 1+1=2 in a commonsense way. But Whitehead and Russell took 378 pages in their Principia to prove 1+1=2. Declaring such mountains of metaphysics as “superior” knowledge has political value. People who cannot understand those 378 pages “needed” for 1+1=2 are forced to trust an “expert”.

The entire colonial tradition of education teaches us to trust only western-approved experts, and distrust everyone else. This creates epistemic dependence for even the simplest things like 1+1=2, making epistemic dissent impossible.

But epistemic dissent is central to decolonization. And much work has already been done to decolonize mathematics.

A successful alternative.
There is an alternative philosophy of mathematics, consolidated in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics and now renamed zeroism.

It rejects the western metaphysics of formal mathematics as religiously biased since the days of Plato, who related mathematics to the soul. Actual teaching experiments have been performed with eight groups in five universities in three countries – Malaysia, Iran and India.

This decolonised math is so easy that the calculus can be taught in five days. Work on this approach to decolonising mathematics and science has been reported in various meetings on decolonisation organised by the Multiversity. It was publicly discussed in newspapers and blogs, and prominently reported in newspapers, magazine articles, interviews and videos.

Decolonised maths rejects the redundant metaphysics of formal math as inferior knowledge. It reverts to a commonsense practical philosophy of mathematics as a technique of approximate calculation for practical purposes. By making math easy, it enables students to solve harder problems that are usually left out of existing courses. It also leads to a better science, the simplest example being a better theory of gravitation arising from correcting Newton’s wrong metaphysical presumptions about calculus.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Slightely adapted from the works of CK RAJU.

This grievance concerns the 9th standard mathematics textbook produced by the National Council of Educational Research and Training . The present grievance is restricted to chapter 5 of that text titled “Euclid’s geometry”, available in electronic form at http://ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm?iemh1=5-15, and related material (Appendix 1) in this and the ncert class 6 mathematics text.

Mathematics is a compulsory subject at the level of class 9, and the text is prescribed for students across India. Hence, the ncert must ensure the accuracy of the texts. However, the said chapter is grossly inaccurate, and involves numerous lies.

A detailed note is posted online at http://ckraju.net/geometry/NCERT-grievance-detailed-note.pdf.

Fraud 1 : No Euclid.

Chapter 5 of the class 9 math text is titled “Euclid’s geometry”, but there is no evidence that “Euclid” existed. The ncert has been made aware of this since 2007, and a prize of Rs 2 lakhs been publicly offered for serious evidence about Euclid. The ncert has no evidence, and denies the need for evidence, hence does not change the text. In effect this amounts to insisting that all Indian school children MUST believe without questioning, which was a goal of colonial education. ncert must (a) either supply evidence, or (b) change the school text, or (c) make public its policy of demanding blind belief.

Fraud 2. “Only greeks used reasoning” when INDIANS too used reasoning.

The retarded ncert text says that though everyone did geometry, in all the world only greeks used reasoning. This is false. Indians too used reasoning, and reasoning was explicitly accepted by most schools of Indian philosophy. Indian mathematicians deduced the earth was round. Children must be taught the truth.

Fraud 3. “Greeks gave axiomatic that is pure deductive proofs or used reasoning in a special way as in present day formal mathematics.”

Greeks did NOT give any proofs in the manner of present-day formal mathematical proofs which exclude the empirical. Specifically, propositions 1 and 4 of ‘euclid’s’ Elements involve empirical proofs, and the proof of proposition 47 (“pythagorean theorem”) depends on these. Hence, there is not a single axiomatic proof in it. Children must be told the truth.

Fraud 4. “Formal axiomatic mathematical proofs are superior - deduction is superior to induction, deductive proofs are superior to empirical proofs”.

This is false and contrary to elementary common sense. Deductive proofs are always inferior to inductive or empirical proofs. This has been most recently explained in detail in the article on Decolonising mathematics, in Alteration 25(2) 2018, pp. 12-43b, https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2018/v25n2a2. This church superstition is the basis of formal mathematics.

Fraud 5. Hiding the church connection.

The attribution to greeks hides the church connection. The church regarded early greeks as its sole friends, and church history claimed that most knowledge was due to christians and friends (the greeks). Since church dogmas shatter against facts, the church glorified the prohibition of facts, and metaphysical or faith-based reasoning as “superior” to fact-based reasoning. Since persuasion (for conversion) was the sole concern of the church, it reinterpreted Greek works on geometry as having the same intent. Actually, the (neoplatonic) “greeks” said mathematics was a way to arouse the soul (which involved a notion of soul cursed by the church).

A hotch potch of incompatible geometries.

The retarded ncert texts hence teach a hotch-potch of distinct and mutually contradictory geometries such as (1) church religious geometry falsely attributed to “euclid”, (2) hilbert’s synthetic geometry, (3) birkhoff’s axiomatic metric geometry, and (4) compass-box geometry which is empirical and metric. Instead the ncert should teach a single coherent system of (empirical) geometry of practical value.

The Alternative.

The rope used in traditional BHARTIYA geometry is superior to the geometry box.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

CK RAJU :

To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Continued from []https://defenceforumindia.com/threads/science-is-not-western-in-origin.83031/post-2051484

CK RAJU :

View attachment 113277

Concluded..