Today I have something wonderful to share. In my articles on Revathi Nakshatram and Revati and 27 CaturYugas, I have indicated that the Precession of Equinoxes was known to Indians by the time of the Bharata War. (For some reason my mind credits Mrkandu and Markandeya with this.. ).
Therefore I have been searching for the instruments with which the Ancient Indians made their observations.
I found this : Astronomical Instruments : Gola bandha Gola Yantra in the Encyclopedia of Classical Sciences in January. It describes how Aryabhatta made a planetary model of our Solar System out of wood, clay, strings and bamboo strips.
We all know how conservative our mainstream historians tend to be and even they cannot put Aryabhatta any later than 476 AD. At least one thousand years before Copernicus was scared to publish that the Sun was the center of the solar system, Aryabhatta had already published it, in his Sanskrit text Aryabhatteeyam! What an intelligent and free thinking scientific society ours was! Only thing was that Europeans did not know this and when we are taught history of science., we are taught the history of western science.
Today I found something really wonderful. Shekher Narveker* of Agnel Polytechnic, Goa, India has published this paper. A pdf file with drawings of the the astro instruments of each 5 Indian mathematician-astronomers by name. This work was published in June 2007, in the proceedings of the World Congress. The International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science.
I would like you to look at the drawings that he has made of Lalla’s geometrical instruments (700 BC – conservative mainstream history date), Bhaskaracharya’s time and angle measuring instruments, (1072 AD – conservative mainstream history date) and Ganesh Daivatanya’s simple and elegant star positioning instrument (1507 AD conservative mainstream history date), and all the other instruments.
Suresh was unable to draw Bhaskaracharya’s Star Positioning Instrument because he says it was hard for him to understand the complex sanskrit terminology at that time of writing the paper. Maybe he or someone else will do it later. He has constructed a model of Bhaskaracharya’s time measuring machine and provided a photograph of it.
Significance of this:
Height of the terrestrial objects, diameter of earth, diameter of moon, circumference of earth and distance between moon and the earth were calculated accurately by Bhaskaracharya using his instruments and trigonometry. (If you have read western accounts of Indian Science, you will hear annoying descriptions about turtles and elephants and oceans, even though, Bhaskaracharya had accurately computed the circumference of the earth, before westerners accepted that the earth was round!)
He has acknowledged Sanskrit Bharati, Bharat Vikas Parishad (for providing the books) and Vishwanath G Joshi for help with Sanskrit. He has provided the original Sanskrit shlokas, the references to the texts and drawings and photographs of models.
Authorship and CopyRight Notice: I waive all my rights to this particular post (but not to the linked articles) and would be happy if the original article by Suresh is given Wide Publicity. You are welcome to copy this article and e-mail it to your friends or to post it in your own blogs. : Satya Sarada Kandula
