From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Dec 13 2000 - 20:35:30 MST
At 04:58 PM 13/12/00 -0800, Spike wrote, while wearing an odd rubber garment:
>So if a nimesa is longer than a second, then a yojana
>is longer than 42 miles, also an improbably long unit for an
>ancient society.
Well...
http://home.ica.net/~roymanju/light.htm
=======================================
The speed of light was determined by Roemer in 1675. Recently it has been
pointed out that an
ancient Sanskrit text of 14th century contains the value of the speed of
light that is identical to the
modern value.
Sayana (1315-1387 A.D.) was a very famous Vedic scholar. He was the prime
minister in the court of
Emperor Bukka I and his successors of the Vijayanagara Empire. In his
commentary on the following
verse in the Rigveda he gives the value for the speed of light.
"O Sun! You see all, create brightness and travel very fast. You brighten
the whole sky." Rigveda
1.50.4
Sayana comments: "It is remembered that Sun traverses 2,202 yojanas in half
a nimesa."
It is to be noted that Bhatta Bhaskara (probably in 10th century) made the
same statement in his
commentary on Taittiriya Brahmana. He says this to be an old Puranic
tradition.
Yojana is an ancient unit of length. Arthasastra defines it as being equal
to 8,000 dhanus, which is
equivalent to 9 miles. Nimesa is an ancient unit of time. One nimesa is
equal to 16/75 seconds. Thus
2,202 yojanas in half a nimesa is equal to 185,794 miles per second after
conversion. This is very
close to the value of 186,000 miles per second for the speed of light. Why
would Sayana call this the
speed of the Sun? The speed of the Sun calculated by Indian astronomers was
very small compared
to this value. It turns out that Sayana was following the ancient Indian
tradition of codifying the
knowledge. In this code Sun represents light. The discovery of this code is
described in the book
"Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism".
This subject has been discussed in detail in a scholarly article ("The
Speed of Light and Puranic
Cosmology", Subhash Kak, "Computing Science in Ancient India", editors T.
R. N. Rao and Subhash
Kak, 1998, pp 80-90). More information about the book is as follows:
Computing Science in Ancient India
Edited by T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak
Published by Center for Advanced Computer Studies in 1998
University of Southwestern Louisiana 70504
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 98-86952
ISBN: 0-9666512-0-0
First edition of "Computing Science in Ancient India'' has been sold out.
It is being republished by
Munshiram Manoharlal and should be available in a couple of months.
Read the review of "Computing Science in Ancient India" by Dr. Raja Ram
Mohan Roy. You can
contact Dr. Roy by sending an e-mail to info@goldenpub.com.
==============================
Damien Broderick
[just trawling the machine]
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