How much was understood in ancient India?
Question
I got a film, “Under Siege”, a Steven Seagal film. Basically, they mentioned – well, this is just a check of veracity of the statement with you obviously. Well, they mentioned how physicists understood the mechanisms of nuclear technology after they had perused ancient Indian text like the Bhagavadgita which go back about 5000 years I believe. A very ancient text amongst the first actually and they mentioned how they peruse the text and they understood the nuclear physics from reading these texts. Now, just suppose of that question and this answer in, I found out that an ancient Indian civilisation, the Harappan Civilization, and just go about 5000 years and made complex cities built at degrees and angles from the monsoons every year and so forth. They build them around the time they build the pyramids. They had amongst the first environment conservation programmes that we know in archaeological literatures. So, they obviously knew a thing or two about science even going back in the Neolithic era. So, how could the science behind this, the veracity...
Answer
Dominic - Certainly, there is quite a lot of interesting science in India. One of the reasons for that is to do with legacy of ancient Greece which actually travelled to India. I think it was through the Persian empire and in fact, in the first few centuries AD, India was quite a big mathematical centre because ancient Greek knowledge had been lost in the west but it was still flourishing in the east. It was only in fact in about the 12th century, it came back to the west. In terms of nuclear physics, I have not heard anything about that. I certainly heard lots about ancient Greek astronomy being found in texts in India, but I don't think the ancient Greek has ever got anywhere near nuclear physics.
Dave - Though there was a nuclear reactor, a very, very ancient reactor which developed somewhere in Africa, but this was millions of years ago when a load of bacteria obviously evolved to collect uranium which have kept them nice and warm. They collected so much that it actually went critical and you actually look in the rocks, you can see the results of a nuclear reactor a bit form a couple of million years ago. But it was anything to do with humans...
Chris - That's called a geo reactor or something, isn't it?
Dave - Yeah. Something like that.
Chris - That they're actually bugs living in the Chernobyl nuclear power station. There's a kind of fungus that's evolved to make extra large amounts of melanin, the same stuff that makes our skin black. Because it's a very electron-rich molecule, it's very good at interrupting the kinds of particles that give rise to the radiation that's coming out of the core of that melted down reactor. So, the fungus is flourishing on the inside of the reactor vessel even now. So, it shows that bugs can tolerate really quite extreme conditions, can they?
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