C. K. Raju’s Blog

Recently, someone who had invited me for a talk, wanted a bio, and sent in a short bio, evidently taken from the Wikipedia, which says

“Much of Raju’s beliefs have been highly controversial, especially his claims that the philosophies that underlie subjects like time and mathematics are rooted in the theocratic needs of the Roman Catholic Church.”

However, to go by the published reviews  (and that is what a Wikipedist is supposed to go by), my books have been critically acclaimed in 9 out of 10 published reviews. Some reviews with sources are listed at amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0039IC97. There are numerous other favourable referee reports and unpublished opinions.

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A more detailed account of calculus without limits for those with a background in formal maths is here in this series of six presentations at the maths department of the Universiti Sains Malaysia in early Feb.

Got a little time off only on my last day in Penang, when I visited the charming snake temple. Saw a huge python, the monocular cobra, king cobra, and pit vipers, all on the loose.

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 After seeing the Three Idiots, I felt I should blog about my experiences with IIT. I was always more interested in science than in engineering, and was put off further after seeing (and hearing) how my brother lived at IIT, Powai where he then was. I shuddered at the thought of spending five prime years of my life there. (Those days the course was five years.) I gave the IIT entrance test under parental duress, and on the explicit condition that I would not be forced to join if I cleared it. I spent about a week preparing, and did clear it, but did not join. (Since, today, people readily tell lies, they may not believe me, so my call letter is given below.) Read the rest of this entry »

 Dear Professor Hoodbhoy,

This refers to your article on “Islam’s arrested development” (Guardian, UK, 25 Nov 2009:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/islam-science-muslims-religion).

I reproduce below my response posted at

http://uk.buzz.yahoo.com/article/1:the_guardian665:47e5bc0f59fdfabb8fd85093cdd0f553/Islams-arrested-development–Pervez-Hoodbhoy

—

I agree that “Science demands a mindset that incessantly questions and challenges assumptions”.

However, I would like to question and challenge the assumption you set out in your previous sentence “To do science, it is first necessary to accept the key premises underlying science – causality and the absence of divine intervention in physical processes, and a belief in the existence of physical law.”

These are not key premises underlying science, but rather key premises underlying post-Crusade Christian theology. In my article “Benedict’s Maledicts” (Indian Journal of Secularism, 10(3) (2006) pp. 79-90, also Zmag.: http://zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3109) I outlined the political compulsions which drove Christian priests to just these theological positions after the Crusades. How come you didn’t notice this remarkable overlap between the premises of Christian theology and what you call the premises of science? This entanglement with Christian theology is the hallmark of Western science.

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Excerpts from an article by Dr Asghar Ali Engineer in Islam and Modern Age. (Dr Engineer won the Right Livelihood Award also called the alternative Nobel prize.)

SCIENCE, WEST AND ISLAMIC ORIGIN OF SCIENCE

Asghar Ali Engineer

Recently I came across an excellent monograph in the form of a small book Is Science Western in Origin? By Pof. C K. Raju, …who has written earlier a book on Time – a thick volume on philosophy of time. The later work is also of high academic standard. This monograph on origin of science is a significant contribution which tries to shatter the myth that science is western in origin.

We would throw more light on it little later but to begin with it would be quite relevant to discuss whether Islam and science go together or, as many believe, Islam is against science. Read the rest of this entry »

Conversation with Shivanand Kanavi, Vice President, Tata Consultancy Services in Ghadar Jari Hai.

Ghadar Jari Hai, Vol III, Issue 3 & 4, 2009

“Indian mathematics is practical whereas the European is metaphysical”

C K Raju has been arguing passionately through several lectures and books about the uniqueness of ancient Indian mathematics and how it influenced the rest of the world. He says what is taught as standard modern mathematics today, is based on theological positions taken by the Church after the Crusades. Shivanand Kanavi conversed with Raju on the results of his research in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

(Excerpts below. The full conversation is available on the website www.ghadar.in)

Shivanand Kanavi: Dr Raju, welcome to peepul he neeche. Having looked at some of your writings, I see that you have researched deeply into the mathematical tradition of India as well as that of Persia, Arabia and Europe. Could you give us an overview of exchanges between India and West Asia in the field of mathematics?

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That was the remark that Come Carpentier made from the chair, during the debate at India International Centre, when he asked for questions and people remained silent for what seemed like a couple of minutes before breaking into a rush of questions.

The debate was on the  “Concepts of science in ancient Indian and modern Western civilizations”. It was with N. Mukunda who is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the Indian Insitute of Science, Bangalore.

My point was that in ancient India the notion of proof was secular and down-to-earth, since empirical, while the West had mixed-up religious belief with science right since Newton. However, Indians have been persuaded to accept Western authority as a substitute for science.

India was colonised by a lie.

More details here.

Newton did not quite understand the imported Indian calculus. To make it compatible with his religious beliefs about mathematics, he made time metaphysical. Newtonian physics failed exactly for this reason and had to be replaced by relativity.

Read the abstract or watch the video of the presentation here.

In a 1980 paper in the Journal of Physics, I predicted that advanced radiation actually exists in small amounts, so that some information travels from future to present and from present to past.  

How to test this experimentally? in my 1994 book Time: Towards a Consistent Theory, I argued that this “hypothesis” of a “tilt in the arrow of time meant that physics must be done using mixed-type functional differential equations. (This is not really a hypothesis, but is just the most general way of doing physics after relativity, but people didn’t see it that way for a century earlier.)

It is gratifying that the study of such equations is finally being taken up on a wider scale. The scientific report of the SDDE09 workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden says:

“Four talks, delivered by Gernot Bauer, Dirk Deckert and C.K. Raju and Savio Rodrigues, considered the equations of motion of charged particles in the action-at-a-distance electrodynamics, which are a neutral mixed-type implicitly state-dependent differential equation, and their formulation and numerical solution as (well-posed) initial value or boundary value problems. These were perhaps the most challenging equations considered during the workshop”. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people dread or dislike learning mathematics. What a pity for a subject which means by derivation the “science of learning”! On my theory, math became difficult, when it got entangled with the post-Crusade Christian theology of reason, used as a weapon against Islam.

The way to make math easy, therefore, is to disentangle it from theology.

This makes math so easy, that a whole course calculus could be taught in 5 days, as I showed in this remarkable experiment at Sarnath.  Here is a presentation (made in Oct at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai) and a paper for a meeting on science education in JNU 12-13 Dec 2009.