C. K. Raju’s Blog

(Note: The following article speaks the truth, instead of taking sides. However, the Indian media being totally polarised, I could not publish the article in either English or Hindi. Hence, am now posting it on my blog, since I feel it is important for me to take a stand on the matter.)

Astrology is a superstition, but why are the colonised unwilling to admit that Johannes Kepler was a superstitious astrologer, who got his livelihood from astrology, and wrote in praise of astrology.  And what of Isaac Newton who superstitiously believed in Biblical creationism and apocalypse. His superstitions rubbed off into science and math as in the “eternal laws of nature”, not to mention his superstitions about the Indian calculus, all of which church superstition we happily teach in schools today.  But there is no outrage among the colonised who blindly accept all church superstitions in mathematics and science. That is exactly why it was the church which brought Western ethnoscience and Western ethnomath to the colonised in general and to India in particular. The real issue is about Western dominance, not science vs superstition.

The Indira Gandhi National Open University recently introduced a postgraduate course in astrology. A similar issue had arisen twenty years ago when the University Grants Commission (UGC) announced a scheme to open 16 university departments, to teach astrology across the country, in 2001. This was hugely opposed, and the late Kapila Vatsyayana organized a public debate, between scientists and astrologers, in the India International Centre, on the desirability of astrology in university education. The late Pushpa Bhargava, Raja Ramanna and I represented scientists. But the astrologers ran away from the debate, though I did later discuss this issue publicly with some other astrologers in other forums. The UGC eventually scrapped the scheme. However, some clarifications given 20 years ago are still relevant.

First, the term “jyotish”, which means time-keeping (through astronomy), is wrongly confounded with astrology (called “phalit jyotish”). The earlier UGC scheme was announced as pertaining to Vedic astrology. However, there is no mention of astrology in the Veda-s. Then, at the India International Centre, I had challenged the assembled scholars, in front of the international press, to show me a single sentence on astrology in the core text of Vedanga Jyotish.¹ No one could do so, and some started asking for my copy of the Vedanga Jyotish, which they had obviously never seen before. The Vedanga Jyotishe is a manual of timekeeping, completely disjoint from astrology.

Indians persistently separated astronomy from astrology, which separation is not limited to the Vedanga Jyotish, last updated around -1500 CE. Thus, Nilakantha’s commentary on the Aryabhatiya is dated to +1500 CE.² During this 3000 year period, there were numerous books written on astronomy in India. These included the Surya Siddhanta, the Aryabhatiya, the Laghu and Maha Bhaskariya of Bhaskar 1, the Brahmasphutasiddhanta of Brahmagupta, the Shishyadhivrddhida of Lalla, Vateshwar Siddhanta, and Gola, Tantrasangraha, Yuktidipika, etc. In none of these books do we find a single sentence related to astrology. The beginning of astrology in India is credited to the 6^th c. Varahamihira, and his Brihat samhita, but even Varahamihira’s astronomy book Pancasiddhantika does not have a single sentence on astrology.

However the colonially educated are deluded that jyotish means astrology. The same colonial education also impacts nationalists. Hence, they repeatedly return to the claim that astrology was an important aspect of Indian tradition since Vedic times. Twenty years ago, Pushpa Bhargava had challenged the teaching of astrology in the Madras High Court. In response, the UGC had said that astrology was an important aspect of ancient Indian tradition, a claim happily accepted by the judge (Kalifulla J.) Nobody asked for evidence that astrology was a significant part of Indian tradition, and nobody offered it.

To the contrary, the Buddha explained³ that common people praise him because he does not earn a livelihood by the unethical means of predicting uncertain future events, such as predicting the victory or defeat of kings in a war, or predicting good or bad rainfall. This was not any specifically Buddhist ethics, since it was the common people (then pre-Buddhist Hindus) who praised the Buddha thus.

In contrast, the West traditionally believed in prophecy. Herodotus⁴ begins his History with the story of Croesus, from Lydia (Turkey), who first made Ionian Greeks his vassals. Before fighting the Persians, Croesus checked the outcome with the Oracle of Delphi. “A great empire will fall” was the prophecy. Unsure about which Empire would fall, Croesus again sent an emissary to ask how long his own rule would last. “Until a mule rules the Medes (Persia)”. Croesus thought that hardly likely and battled Cyrus the Great and lost. The prophecy was then explained that Cyrus  was the mule since he was of mixed descent. Of course, had the outcome been different, there would have been no need for an explanation. This illustrates how foretelling the future was traditionally based on subtle con-tricks.

Prophets were given a very high religious status in the West. Hence, during the Crusades, the church tried to put down Muslims by the criticism that Paigambar Muhammad made no prophecy. Unfortunately, the strange response of Muslims to this critique has been to translate Paigambar (meaning messenger) as Prophet!

Traditional Western superstitions did not magically disappear with the advent of science. Johannes Kepler, famous for his “laws” of planetary motion, wrote on the fundamentals of astrology.⁵ Before he grabbed the high church position of Astronomer Royal to the Holy Roman Empire, Kepler was a practising astrologer, and he wrote that providing astrology as a means of livelihood to astronomers was proof the of pre-established harmony created by God!

Even Isaac Newton superstitiously believed in Biblical creation, some 6000 years ago. He explicitly used it to deny the antiquity of Egypt.⁶ He also believed the Bible correctly foretold the future apocalypse of the world at the “seventh trumpet”.⁷ Indeed, belief in prophecy, or the belief that the future can be foretold, persists in the scientific belief in the mechanistic evolution of the world according to some “eternal laws of nature”. This belief in “eternal laws of nature” is a Christian dogma first propounded by Thomas Aquinas.⁸ This dogma, is not, for example, acceptable in Buddhism,⁹ or Islam,¹⁰ or Hinduism.¹¹

But, both Newton and Kepler believed in this dogma, and we teach it in our schools today.¹² This dogma asserts that the future is determined and predictable by the knowledgeable, like prophets and Laplace’s demon. (On Karl Popper’s formulation, Laplace’s demon is a super-scientist, who knows all the laws of nature, a super-observer, and a super-computer, who can hence calculate the future.¹³) Of course, no one knows how the “laws of nature” or equations of physics (supposedly) causally determine human actions, any more than anyone knows how planets determine human actions. So, the difference between the demon and astrology is a matter of technique, not of principle.

The colonially educated believe Indians were especially superstitious. But the experimental method was used in India, long before Bacon,¹⁴ and many traditional Indian astronomers spoke out against superstition. For example, it is said that Indians believed that Rahu  and Ketu are the cause of eclipses. This myth is undoubtedly found in the Purana-s. However, the eighth century Lalla titled the 20th chapter of his Sisyadhivrdhida¹⁵ as the “Correction of mythical knowledge”. Here he gives several arguments why demons such as Rahu, cannot be the cause of an eclipse. In the 26th sloka he says “In a solar eclipse, people in different parts (of the earth) see different portions of the Sun eclipsed. Some do not see (the eclipse) at all. Knowing this, who can maintain that an eclipse is caused by Rahu?” Further, Lalla (20:22) asks why eclipses occur only near the full moon or new-moon. In contrast, the Bible (Luke 23:44-45) states the superstition that God caused a solar eclipse at noon on the crucifixion of Jesus, which is impossible, because Easter, or the supposed date of resurrection of Jesus, is linked to the full moon when a solar eclipse is impossible. Before the 19^th c., which Western astronomer rejected this Biblical assertion as a superstition?

The conclusion is that scientific thinking is a much older part of Indian tradition than astrology which was probably imported in the 6^th c., and true nationalists ought to encourage that older tradition. On the other hand, church superstitions still flourish in science (and math) and the tail-wagging colonised who believe science is a matter of Western approval, not critical thinking, need to understand that.

This is a video recording my concluding seminar (25 March 2021) as a Tagore Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

Twitter summary:
1. Ganita (गणित) differs from (formal) math,
2. it makes math easy, and
3. makes science better.
4. This is an obituary of formal math.

Slogan formulation
Formal math is dead,
long live normal math (गणित)

Detailed “abstract” (synoptic contents etc.) in three layers..

Presentation.

Best run on site (without downloading). Space bar moves presentation forward. Blue text indicates hyperlinks (for those who would like to examine the briefly displayed material in detail).

(elaborated and simplified)

An interactive workshop at the Berlin festival for time issues 24, 25 March 2020, 1500-1800 Berlin time. Facebook live stream: http://facebook.com/MaerzMusik
will be only of the conference talk on the 21st March 1430 to 1600 Berlin time (1900 to 2030 IST).

The workshop will cover the following 12 topics related to the book. Each topic will be covered in an average of approximately 20 minutes. After each hour there will be questions for around half an hour.

The book begins and ends with the Fisherman’s story: to marry a mermaid the Fisherman wants to lose his soul, but does not know how to do so.

1. Life after deathMany ancient cultures believed in the soul and life after death, as in the stories of Nachiketa, Socrates, Chuang Tzu (butterfly’s dream), or sufi poems like those of Rumi
2. Sceptics Equally, however, many ancient and modern sceptics rejected the belief in life after death. An ancient sceptic, Payasi, performed a variety of experiments with dying persons to test and reject the belief in life after death.
3. Cosmic recurrence or “cyclic” timeHowever, Payasi’s experiments refute only a simplistic belief in life after death. The correct understanding of the ancient belief in life after death is in the context of cosmic recurrence (as in Bhagvad Gita), or as in the Nietzsche’s attempted reconstruction. Ancient symbols of cyclic time include the Egyptian Ouroboros, the Buddhist Kalachakra, the Maya/Aztec calendar stones, and the Nataraja (dancing Shiva). With cosmic recurrence, not only are people reborn, everything in the cosmos repeats. Roughly, this corresponds to cyclic time. This notion of life after death with “cyclic” time meets all the objections raised by sceptics, both ancient and modern. But is it science?
4. Cosmic recurrence in physicsCosmic recurrence or “cyclic” time is scientifically possible. In Newtonian physics, on the Poincare recurrence theorem, the cosmos must recur if it is closed. That is, every microstate of a closed cosmos must repeat to an arbitrary degree of precision, infinitely often. The theorem can be extended to general relativity (case of geodesic flow), and a similar theorem holds in quantum mechanics. I point out the flaws in the text-book resolution of the recurrence paradox of thermodynamics.
5. The curse on cyclic timeApart from physics we need to understand also the politics of time beliefs. The church, after it married the Roman state, cursed this belief in life after death in the context of cosmic recurrence. Early Christianity derived from Egyptian mystery religion (“paganism”). As elaborated by Origen, it accepted cosmic recurrence; it also accepted equity. But the later-day post-Nicene church misrepresented cosmic recurrence as the collapse of morality. The real political reason was to promote inequity: the state-church wanted to project exclusive benefits for converting to Christianity, to be able to sell Christianity. (more…)

A reporter from Africa met me recently in India to find out about the events concerning the panel discussion on decolonisation in Cape Town, a year ago. Someone here asked: could he be a church agent, who may again present a biased picture? I don’t know. But he does not seem to know any math, and may not have understood my critique of formal math. So, to make sure that others (especially the ill-informed) do not “control the narrative”, and totally misrepresent it, it is time I put up my side of things.

An important background, to the debate last year in the University of Cape Town, which has not been adequately mentioned, is my book The Eleven Pictures of  Time (Sage 2003). In it I extensively criticised the book Large Scale Structure of Space-Time by Stephen Hawking, and G. F. R. Ellis, of the University of Cape Town. (Note, in passing, that Hawking unethically collaborated with Ellis at a time when there was an academic boycott of apartheid.) My key issue with the Hawking and Ellis book was that their conclusions about a “singularity” involved bad mathematics, and a bad understanding of calculus (even from within  formal mathematics).

But let us go one step at a time. First, their conclusion that the cosmos began with a  “singularity” was not science (since not refutable on Popper’s criterion). Second, their conclusion was of great political significance to the church, through the claim that science supports the church’s religious dogmas of creation. The  mathematical conclusion of a singularity is explicitly connected by Hawking and  Ellis to religious beliefs about creation and other dogmas. The key takeaway of their book (p. 364) is that “the actual point of creation, the singularity, is outside  the presently known laws of physics.”

The belief that God rules the world with eternal “laws” of nature is itself a religious church dogma first articulated by Aquinas, not a scientific (refutable) belief. Simply put, the church supports it, but Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam deny it.  (See this minuted discussion for example, which explains that Hinduism accepts rta, but not immutable laws, for Buddhism, see the video “Buddhism and science”, for Islam see the keynote and article on Islam and science.) Further, other religions accept continuous creation, or the creativity of living organisms (not continuous creation in the mechanistic sense of the theory of Bondi, Gold, Hoyle and Narlikar). The big bang theory alone is NOT the opposite of continuous creation. The “singularity”, interpreted as a beginning of time, relates to creation  more clearly than the big bang, which need not be a true beginning of time, but could be just the other side of a big crunch in an oscillating cosmos.

There is no doubt about the religiosity of the book by Hawking and Ellis. Ellis got  the million dollar Templeton award, for putting together science and religion, and Hawking never got the Nobel prize! The church greatly glorified Stephen Hawking, and that church propagandist support helped sell millions of copies of his book  Brief History of Time which restated the conclusions of singularity theory for a lay audience.  But singularities and creationism are simply not physics. Therefore, much as Hawking desired the Nobel prize, and much as the Nobel prize committee may have wanted to give it to him, they simply could not do so.

The physicist F. J. Tipler (Physics of Immortality) pushed this connection of science and religion via singularity theory. He explicitly claimed that singularity theory proves the truth of Judeo-Christian theology. In the opening paragraphs, Tipler said his book aimed

“to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics…the area of global general relativity…created…by the great British physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking.”

The colonised mind may talk against creationism, in support of Darwinism, but it never dared contest this kind of religious claim of creationism backed by Western authority. Despite the millions who read Stephen Hawking’s book, Brief History of Time, I have not heard a SINGLE other dissenting voice in the last thirty years. (more…)

The Palestine Technical University, Kadourie, Palestine, is organizing the Sixth Palestinian Conference on Modern Trends in Mathematics and Physics PCMTMP-VI, 5th-8th August 2018.

I was invited to give two plenary talks (scheduled on 7th and 8th Aug) on
Decolonising mathematics: how and why it makes science better (and enables students to solve harder problems)

An extended summary and abstract of my proposed talk are posted online.

The Israeli embassy has, however, refused me a visa. No official reason or explanation was offered for the denial of visa. When I asked, an official from the Israeli embassy did very rudely warn me not to apply ever again for an Israeli visa.

Now five years ago, I visited Palestine (See blog post “Mathematics in refugee camps”, and a nice video on History and Philosophy of science). Of course, I did have a terrible experience with the Israelis: they charged me some USD 200 for a taxi for 8.5 km, then put me on a share taxi and promised to give the receipt after I crossed the border! Never encountered such terrible cheats anywhere else in the world. But last time the Israeli embassy in India had issued me a visa.

So, I am left wondering what has changed. Three things have changed. 1. Decolonisation, 2. Einstein, and 3. Indo-Israeli relationship
(more…)

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