Indian Space Research Organisation chairman, S. Somnath. File photograph
| Photo Credit: S.R. Raghunathan
India was a knowledge society since Vedic times involving Maths, drugs, metaphysics, astronomy and so forth written in Sanskrit, however all such studying got here again to the nation a number of thousand years later as “discoveries by Western scientists”, Indian Space Research Organisation chairman S. Somnath has stated.
Addressing the fourth convocation ceremony of the Maharishi Panini Sanskrit and Vedic University right here on Wednesday, Mr. Somnath stated Sanskrit was one of essentially the most historic languages of the world with its repertoire together with poetry, logic, grammar, philosophy, science, know-how, maths and different allied topics.
“Surya Sidhanta, the very first book I came across in Sanskrit talks about the domain I am familiar with. This book specifically talks about solar system, how planets move around the sun, periodicity of this movement, timescales etc,” he stated.
“All this knowledge travelled from here, reached the Arabs, then went to Europe and thousands of years later came back to us as discoveries of great Western scientists. However, all this knowledge was written here in this language Sanskrit,” Mr. Somnath asserted.
The imprint of the contribution of scientists that was expressed in Sanskrit down the ages in fields like astronomy, atmospheric sciences, organic sciences, drugs, physics, aeronautics can been seen by way of the journey of Indian tradition, the ISRO chief added.
‘Ancient knowledge not exploited’
The level is that this knowledge had not been full exploited or researched, he stated, including that inviting individuals like him to speak about science and Sanskrit will assist the organisers to take the subsequent step of exhibiting that Sanskrit can be utilized to simply convey scientific thought and the method of science.
Concepts like ‘shunya’ (zero) in addition to infinity had been found by historic sages, whereas Algebra, the Pythagoras Theorem had been expressed exactly and in poetic type (in Sanskrit), Mr. Somnath stated.
“Many other concepts like that of vimana, architecture, the concept of time, the structure of the universe, how it evolved and grew, metallurgy, chemical technologies, medicine treatment, languages, the structure of grammar, shastras like Nyaya, sangeet, spirituality, Yoga have been expressed beautifully in Sanskrit,” he stated.
Also learn: Back to the Vedic age
The problem confronted by scientists of the time was that Sanskrit was expressed extra in ‘shruti’ (sound) that in written kind, which additionally made the language extra stunning to hear that many different languages, Mr. Somnath stated.
“That’s why it survived. Today you don’t need that shruti structure, which is the beauty of this language as it is a formula based and logical based language. We scientists love this kind of language, which is rule based, syntax based, something which suits the computer language,” he stated.
Those working in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, machine studying love Sanskrit and there’s a lot of analysis underway to see how it may be used for computing and pure language processing, the ISRO chief stated.
