Decolonising math and science education

C. K. Raju

I: Secularizing math and history

This refers to Srinivas Ramani’s report on the conference on “Decolonising our Universities” (EPW, 23 July, 2011). Hard sciences are critical¹ for the project of decolonisation: Macaulay pointed to them and, even today, it is the desire for science and technology (not Western social science) which is still used to promote Western education. Ramani’s misreporting of my talk, therefore, subverts the whole agenda of decolonisation, which will not work if it is restricted to social sciences. The decolonisation agenda, however, is politically very important, for it seeks to complete the unfinished struggle for independence. Accordingly, the record needs to be set straight.

My talk covered three broad topics: (1) a new math pedagogy delinking mathematics from post-Crusade Christian theology, (2) a proposal to eliminate the racist Western history of science from the curriculum, and (3) a change in the physics syllabus. While the Malaysian press reported separately² on the first two points, Ramani misunderstood all three. That misunderstanding is not peculiar to him, but reflects a widespread colonised mindset, which is exactly what the conference set out to change. That mindset rejects all criticism, by means of stock prejudices, without addressing the critique, and without regard to the gravity of the situation. Because these prejudices are widespread, a somewhat detailed response is required. My response is in two parts: here I take up the questions about mathematics and history, while physics and Einstein are postponed to part 2.

The first major issue is that formal mathematics which is taught in our schools and universities on the belief that it is “universal” is not even secular, but instead indoctrinates the students into post-Crusade Christian metaphysics, and against all other religious beliefs. Ramani first says the argument is beyond his ken, but then trivialises the thesis by lapsing into the stereotype that any opposition to the West must be anchored in some ethnocentric preference.

In fact, the argument for my claim is so simple and robust that it can be quoted right here from my paper (the footnote numbering is different).

It is very easy to see why present-day university mathematics is not universal, and never can be. The philosophy of present-day mathematics, known as formalism, due to Russell and Hilbert, reduces mathematics to metaphysics, and it is commonsense that metaphysics can never be universal. Far from being universal, the metaphysics underlying formal university mathematics is, in fact, contrary to all Indian systems of philosophy (including Nyaya, Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya-Yoga,, Buddhist, Jain and Lokayata) and to Islamic beliefs. This again is rather obvious. All Indian systems of philosophy, without exception, accept the empirically manifest (pratyaksa) as the first means of proof (pramana).

But present-day mathematics rejects empirical proofs.³ ...

Further, racist Western scholars, who have extolled deduction, made a naïve mistake in assuming deduction to be universal. Thus, deduction is based on logic, mistakenly assumed to be universal by Western philosophers since the Crusades.⁴ However, the Buddhist logic of catuskoti and the Jain logic of syadavada is different⁵ from the 2-valued logic declared to be universal by the West and used to prove the theorems of present-day mathematics.⁶ The use of such logics...for deduction would lead, like quantum logic,⁷ to a different class of mathematical theorems, and invalidate numerous existing mathematical proofs based on proof by contradiction. Thus, present-day mathematics is specially biased against Buddhism, Jainism and Lokayata, the three nastika (“atheistic”) Indian philosophies. …

Though the philosophy of formal mathematics accepts in theory that the postulates of a mathematical theory are arbitrary and not universal... the postulates...are decided, in practice, by Western mathematicians, and students throughout the world are wrongly taught that other ways of doing things, like computer arithmetic, for example, are erroneous, though all practical mathematics can be and is done today using a computer. Apart from biases against practical ways of doing things, those postulates laid down by Western mathematicians may and do involve biases against Islamic thought, for example. As I have explained elsewhere,⁸ the atomistic beliefs of the followers of al Ashari are compatible with computer arithmetic.⁹

Clearly, I have pointed to various traditions (including Islam) to show the non-universality of the metaphysics underlying Western mathematics. It is certainly not a simplistic agenda to blindly restore Indian tradition as Ramani incorrectly suggests by saying it was “based on” mere ethnocentric preference, “in favour of the traditional Indian notion of pramana”.

Ramani omits the other conclusive argument about the cultural dependence of logic.¹⁰ This shows that deduction, long extolled by the West, is neither universal, nor certain, nor even more certain than induction, though the contrary belief is instilled by colonial education since that is the basis of much Western philosophy, not only mathematics. (I have explained elsewhere¹¹ how this wrong belief about deduction relates to the post-Crusade Christian theology of reason.) These two arguments together should end forever the superstitious belief in the universality of Western mathematics. (I call it “superstitious” because it is a false and widespread belief which is damaging to the interests of those who believe it.)

Further, as indicated in the above quote, I argued¹² that if math is taught and valued primarily for its applications to science and technology (and not for purposes of indoctrination) then using empirical means of proof cannot hurt it. However, this appeal to science and technology, not tradition, to justify empirical means of proof, and hence reject Western authority in mathematics, does not fit the ethnocentric stereotype and is not mentioned by Ramani.

This prejudiced depiction undermines the gravity of the matter. A religious bias in present-day formal mathematics makes its teaching unconstitutional both in secular countries like India, and in Muslim countries where teaching a pro-Christian bias is unacceptable. So, the mathematics curriculum ought to be immediately changed in schools and universities across those countries. Ducking the issue by saying that it is beyond one’s ken should not turn into a license to misrepresent, or an indirect vote for status quo. I even explained¹³ how religious belief got into 2+2=4, as currently taught (through Peano’s axioms, set theory, etc.). This was understood and appreciated by the student rapporteurs and journalists, who had no special knowledge of math. Hundreds of millions of Indians are expected to abide by the constitution written in a language they don’t understand. If ignorance of law is nevertheless no excuse, why should ignorance of mathematics be permitted as an excuse to ignore the law?

There is a colonial trap here (picked up by the Malaysian press) that the widespread ignorance of math serves as an instrument of social control, just like ordinary illiteracy, for it forces people to rely blindly on the decisions of a handful of “experts”. However, the designated “experts” are all trained in formal (Western) math. So, there is a conflict of interests, since they might lose their expert status, and their lifetime work could well be reduced to junk status if they accepted a change. This system (“expert raj”) which used colonial education to tie Western interests with those of non-Western decision-makers ensures that we have no way to decide the mathematics curriculum independently of the West. Thus, in India, my repeated challenges for a public debate on this issue have been ignored by the “experts”; and even the racist history in school texts remains uncorrected for the last three years (see below). The conference aimed to break these systems of control.

Further, Ramani incorrectly states that my salient point was that “an alternat[ive] history and philosophy of mathematics had [yet] to be worked out”. In fact, this has already been worked out, and reported in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics (Pearson, 2007). An alternative calculus pedagogy too has been developed, and has been tried out in experiments on five groups of students, including one group in India. The results have been reported by me,¹⁴ and were also picked up by the Malaysian press¹⁵ for this alternative and demonstrated pedagogy of math is a key new feature to have publicly emerged at the decolonisation conference. So, the alternative is is before us now, and it has been demonstrated to enhance the practical applicability of math. The other salient point is that eliminating the religious bias (and the related theological millstone) from math also makes it easy enough to teach to social scientists, so they are not condemned to remain ignorant of math as happens with colonial education which pushes them into the colonial trap mentioned above. This again was highlighted by the Malaysian press, and is part of a forthcoming monograph.¹⁶

Having trivialised my thesis about the mathematics curriculum by fitting it into the ethnocentric stereotype, Ramani negates my other thesis about the science curriculum by saying that it was marred by an intemperate and ad hominem attack on Einstein among others. Though he does not explicitly say so, this suggests, by implication, that I am not even aware of the norms of a good argument and indiscriminately launch personal attacks on great figures without evidence, and without relevance, and could not therefore have had anything very serious to say. Whether or not Ramani intended to say all that, that is how most people will interpret it, especially those hostile to the agenda. This is an intolerable misrepresentation even from an admittedly ill-informed position. Let me explain why, though this requires some elaboration, especially about Einstein who is postponed to the second part of this response.

But what exactly is Ramani’s objection about the others? Is it his case that if Western hagiography has been so far removed from the truth, that was OK, but it is “intemperate” now to tell the truth? Or is it his case that what I said was not true? That surely cannot be, because he has not contested even one substantial point about my exposure of “Euclid”, “Ptolemy”, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, Tycho, Mercator, etc., about all of whom I have amassed evidence in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics. This is a new history which exposes large-scale Western fraud: to call it a series of ad hominem attacks is like saying that exposing the Commonwealth Games scam is a just a series of personal attacks on Kalmadi et al.

This method of rejecting the new history, without contesting any argument, and just by supposing that the West could not have been so very wrong, is a sure sign of a superstition, for it involves blind faith in the West. Now I have argued¹⁷ that present-day Western authority was built on pre-colonial history which is a fraud like astrology, though, in this case, it is the Western educated Indian elite which is devoted to it. To expose this superstitious belief in the West, I have followed the example set by Abraham Kovoor and have offered a prize of Rs 1.5 lakhs for reliable (primary) evidence for the existence of “Euclid” whose white skinned picture¹⁸ continues to adorn Indian school texts,¹⁹ with a view to indoctrinate students into awe of the West, though neither the authors nor NCERT have been able to produce any primary sources²⁰ to authenticate those offensive pictures. (Incidentally, in this case, my claim is that the relevant Euclid is not a real homo, but a concoction, so how can it be ad hominem?) Ramani, and those who think like him, should claim the prize. Else he should have the moral courage to admit his mistake, and expiate it by starting a campaign to reform Indian school texts and punish the irresponsible authors and officials of the NCERT responsible for such racist propaganda. Incidentally, this shows the colonised elite is unperturbed by false history being taught in our schools, provided it is of Western origin.

Or is it Ramani’s case that this new history is not relevant? My booklet²¹ sold at the conference explains (on its back cover) that Western history of science was systematically distorted during the religious fervour of the Crusades (leading to concoctions about “Greeks”, such as “Euclid” and “Claudius Ptolemy”). This distortion developed during the Inquisition, leading to systematically false claims of “independent rediscovery”, such as those of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe etc. This led to the view, contrary to commonsense, where all science is attributed to the theologically-correct: early “Greeks” or Christians in post-renaissance Europe. This systematic falsification of history by the church, was used to promote racism (e.g. by Kant²², Hume etc.) and later colonialism (by Macaulay).

The church used fraudulent history as a key means of soft power or mind control since Orosius. This was also the secret weapon of colonialism as explained in my other book Ending Academic Imperialism: a Beginning,²³ made available at the conference. Thus, false history, as an instrument of soft power, helped to “soften” up influential people like Raja Rammohun Roy, before it was used by Macaulay to institute indoctrination through colonial education. Therefore, as I stated in that book, the critical first step towards decolonisation is to pull down this false history of science.

Now it is one thing that Ramani did not understand my propositions about mathematics and physics. It is quite another that he did not understand my thesis about the systematic falsification of history and its use as an instrument of power to establish colonialism. To decolonise, one must free oneself from Western authority, in science, and that requires one to expose the false history on which that authority was built. So, how did Ramani confound my attack on Western authority with a series of “personal” attacks on individuals (two of whom don’t even exist!)? One possible explanation comes from the congruence of Ramani’s views with the attitude that colonial myths seek to inculcate—of awe towards the West—by constantly glorifying Western figures, and belittling all others. Those myths seem to have so captured his mind, that it is beyond his imagination that his icon Einstein was a con man, or that I, a mere Indian, could have corrected both Newton and Einstein, figures which those myths taught him to revere as demi-gods. Hence, he rushed to “save the myth”. To repeat, this phenomenon is not unique to Ramani; numerous indoctrinated people are disturbed and respond similarly when Western authority is attacked. Like him, they reason fallaciously²⁴ that “so many people believed this for so long, they can’t all be wrong can they?” The fallacy is exposed by asking for reliable evidence. Ramani, in his editorial capacity, should have noticed that he has none.

II. Einstein and functional differential equations

Let me now come to the issue of Einstein.

First, since science rests on math, a religious bias in mathematics is bound to creep into science, so that science and its teaching too should be changed. To illustrate this bias, I pointed to Newton's “laws”, the typical first lesson in science. But the belief in “laws” of nature is not a scientific or refutable belief. It is, however, part of post-Crusade Christian theology.²⁵ This church dogma masquerading as science has been and continues to be used to attack Islamic beliefs as “unscientific”, most recently in the Gaurdian, London.²⁶ This shows that scientists persistently decide the truth of even the most elementary scientific propositions by blindly relying on Western authority, despite endless harangues about the scientific method.

I also went into the content of Newton’s “laws”. I stated that the ordinary differential equations of Newtonian physics must be replaced by functional differential equations, and this leads to a paradigm shift in physics, as I have been arguing.²⁷ This was a key change I suggested in the physics curriculum.

Since, the organizers of the conference had repeatedly warned me to avoid any mathematics, I gave a physical demonstration that Newton’s “laws” are contrary to mundane experience. I sprinkled some water (see the video of my talk²⁸) and pointed out that this is irreversible, contrary to the reversibility built into Newton’s “laws”. Now, if science is really based on experiment, then Newton’s laws should have been rejected long ago on this ground. However, the belief in those “laws” was preserved by a stock trick: piling on the hypotheses. This trick is propagated by the authority of current physics texts in thermodynamics²⁹ (This conflict is resolved if we switch to functional differential equations.³⁰)

Now, I have explained that religious beliefs crept into science through the notion of time central to both science and religion.³¹ In this specific case, Newton made a mistake about time while assimilating the imported Indian calculus³² into the prevailing European religious belief that mathematics was perfect (since it supposedly embodied eternal truths³³). To make the calculus “perfect”, Newton turned time metaphysical,³⁴ and that led to the failure of his physics and its replacement by relativity. This thesis is a bit difficult to explain to the uninformed, especially within tight time or space limits.

First, as I explained long ago,³⁵ relativity originated from an analysis of the notion of time in Newtonian physics, and not from any experiment,³⁶ as is wrongly taught in current physics texts. That entire theory flows from a new way of measuring equal intervals of time by postulating that the speed of light is constant. Poincare explained, formulated and published the entire theory of (special) relativity, and so named it, ahead of Einstein, in 1904. This is the context for pointing out that Einstein only grabbed the credit by copying those ideas.

How does one know Einstein copied? My “epistemic test” says that a mistake is proof of copying (in the context of a suspicious claim of “independent rediscovery”). Einstein made such a mistake: he failed to notice that relativity compels functional differential equations (which is what I would like to see in the decolonised science curriculum.) In fact, being a non-mathematician, Einstein never did understand lifelong the fundamental qualitative differences between the irreversibility of (retarded) functional differential equations and the reversibility of ordinary differential equations, and carelessly substituted one for the other.³⁷ Poincare, on the other hand, being a mathematician, noticed it, though he mentioned it only in passing, and I spotted it since I was on the same tack. Thus, “Einstein’s mistake”, in this context, is not just “mistake” as in “mistake in calculation”, but “mistake” as in “mistake made by a thief” which leads to his being caught.

Didn’t Einstein’s contemporaries spot his ignorance of mathematics? Indeed they did, and Hilbert even remarked that “every boy in the streets of Goettingen” knows more mathematics than Einstein. How, then, could Einstein have invented relativity? When confronted with a fact counter to a story, people tend to “save the story” by piling on hypotheses. Hilbert ingeniously explained³⁸ that Einstein had made original contributions, just because he had learnt nothing about mathematics or the philosophy of time! (If so, producing creative scientists should be easy: just keep people ignorant!)

My explanation is more mundane than Hilbert’s magical one. As a patent clerk, Einstein knew the legality that one may legally copy ideas, provided one does not copy the exact expression of those ideas. He had the audacious plan of copying ideas from the best-known people in the field. What, after all, did he stand to lose? Not even his low-paid job! Poincare’s idea was not the only one he claimed; he also claimed credit for the work of Boltzmann, Gibbs, Hilbert (later Bose). In the process he made that serious mistake about relativity: he did not understand that changing the way of measuring time also made physics history-dependent, unlike Newton's “laws”.³⁹

Now, once this mistake has been pointed out, the teaching of relativity (a first year undergraduate subject) ought to have changed. But that did not happen in the last two decades. Why not? Because science, in practice, amounts to blind belief in Western authority, howsoever derived. Once Einstein became a figure of great scientific authority, few dared to challenge him. Western scientific authority follows the church system of marginalising dissent: the church called dissenters “heretics”, and the Western science establishment labels them “cranks”—no arguments needed, especially not in public. This criterion of reputability (as distinct from Popper’s criterion of refutability) helps to preserve bad science, just as it helped to preserve egregiously bad theology (e.g. the date of creation as fixed by that most reputable worthy, the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, in the 17^th c.).

Because functional differential equations involve a paradigm shift, that issue which confused Einstein confused other physicists as well. Physicists accustomed to Newton's “laws”, find it odd that the future of the cosmos depends not only on its state now, but on its entire past history. This issue emerged in the 1999 Groningen debate, where my claim of a paradigm shift in physics via functional differential equations was challenged. I believe the issues were conclusively settled by my 2004 paper⁴⁰ which resolved that confusion and actually solved functional differential equations in a significant physical context, for the first time—something which ought to have been done a century earlier, had the credit for relativity not gone to Einstein. At least now the curriculum should have been changed?

Now, there are two issues here. The first issue is the straightforward one of a curriculum change: to introduce functional differential equations in the syllabus. This issue could conceivably be tackled even within the frame of Western scientific authority, by persuading it, for the argument, after all, is convincing, and published in respected Western forums.

But why should a change in the science syllabus require Western authorisation? If scientists cannot decide scientific truth on their own, then they can no more do science than a musician can play music if he cannot internally discriminate good music from bad, and is required to stop and seek approval every minute. Because science, today, involves big money, scientific authority has turned very repressive, and even Westerners have started finding it stifling: the need to challenge scientific authority was, hence, also the thrust of my acceptance speech,⁴¹ for the TGA award which I received last year,⁴² in Hungary for pointing out Einstein’s mistake. The situation is worse for the colonised, with our science academies having been reduced to mere clearinghouses for Western endorsement—and this is being made into a law by Kapil Sibal! Science, whatever its image, institutionalises subordination to Western authority, and it was used for that purpose since Macaulay.

Therefore, the second issue is this. Decolonisation, the primary agenda of the conference, requires us to throw off the yoke of Western scientific authority. To do so in practice, one has to expose cases where Western authority has failed badly. What better example than that of Einstein? He has been endorsed as the greatest scientific genius in the West, an endorsement which held up scientific development for a century! Naturally, this issue must be taken to the people, since to rely solely on the in camera opinions of Western-endorsed experts is to fall into the colonial trap—our relativity “experts” (who were once my friends) all have their vested interests, just like “experts” in formal math.

The Eleven Pictures of Time was intended for the general reader, and sought to make these issues clear. But how to explain to a general reader that Einstein had copied from Poincare? Thus, my epistemic test assumes some knowledge of relativity not available with a general reader. Moreover, Einstein supporters, like Pais, are out to confound issues and obscure the truth as much as possible. Hence, I argued as follows. It is well know that Einstein had avidly followed Poincare’s work until 1902, and that it had kept him “breathless with excitement for weeks”. It is also known⁴³ that Poincare had published the entire theory of relativity (both the philosophy and the mathematical aspects) ahead of Einstein. Finally, it is known that though Einstein denied reading those papers of Poincare and Lorentz, he used new terms coined in those papers. Given this circumstantial evidence that Einstein had read those papers, why should we believe Einstein’s claim that he had not read those papers? Einstein's claim to relativity hangs on just his personal credibility.

As explained on my website,⁴⁴ Einstein cannot be given the “benefit of doubt”, for that principle of criminal law does not apply to a dead person, and should not be used to preserve bad history. History must work with balance of probabilities. That necessarily requires us to get into questions about Einstein’s moral character. Was he really a person of such high moral character that he never lied so we must believe him despite circumstantial evidence to the contrary?

This brings us to my joke that E= mc² meant that “Einstein = male chauvinist squared”. Even that joke is well documented! Thus, as pointed out in the section E=MC? in my book Eleven Pictures of Time Einstein used his reputation to womanize, and then called women a “species” without brains⁴⁵ perhaps because they submitted to his overtures. Surely that is male chauvinism?

My website even clarifies that my point about Einstein’s moral character has been misunderstood by careless readers, accustomed to newspaper sleaze, who did not read my statement that “children are not illegitimate though parents or the social order may be”. My point was not that Einstein had one or more children out of wedlock. My point was instead this: Einstein lied lifelong about his first “illegitimate” child, and never saw her face, just so that society should think well of him. A person who could sacrifice his own child, just to improve his social image, could, in my judgment, tell a thousand lies about what papers he read or did not read.

To summarise, if physics is to be de-theologised, and taught correctly, using functional differential equations, we have to first reject the story of Einstein as the originator of relativity. This can be done using the epistemic test. But that is available only for experts who are under the thumb of Western authority. For general people, kept scientifically illiterate by colonial education, this necessarily requires us to get into questions of Einstein’s moral character—which was flawed like his science. The case of Einstein helps to demonstrate a major failure of Western scientific authority. Rejecting that authority is essential for decolonisation.

Against this background, let me further point out that Einstein was incidental to my main presentation. I was not arguing that Einstein is a fraud: my arguments to that effect are all already in print, they have stood unchallenged for years, and I am done with that. I was arguing against Western authority. I was trying to explain the nature of superstition in science, by using the case of Einstein to illustrate the blind reliance on Western authority. The point I made (please refer to my presentation⁴⁶) was how does one decide the truth of E=F (Einstein = Fraud)? The phrase “how do you decide?” was marked in red. What is the process? This was in the title to indicate that the focus was on the process, not the proposition. (In fact, this is a common method of illustration in formal mathematical logic.⁴⁷) I clearly stated that the process persistently involves blind belief in Western authority. Certainly, it is my stated aim to expose its foolish failures. For, as explained above, the agenda is decolonisation, not merely a change in the science curriculum: a change in the process, not only the particulars.

People commonly believe in Einstein by using the process stated in my presentation: “(scientific) illiterates deciding truth by trusting those who have exploited them for centuries”, a process similar to those who believe in astrology, though I added that “trusting the West is more dangerous than trusting astrologers”, for the West is obviously far more powerful.

My presentation (like my TGA acceptance speech) also recommended the correct process: to read Einstein, Poincare and me. To enable this correct process at least Poincare and I took a lot of trouble to explain everything to the layperson without using a single equation. However, the prejudices inculcated into the colonial mindset block this correct process. From a position of complete ignorance about relativity and its history, many people choose to bet that Western society could not be so badly wrong, so it is the Indian challenger who may be dismissed without bothering to read him. Ramani did not even see what was placed before him on my slides.

The only other person mentioned in my presentation was Atiyah. I didn’t go into details in my talk, but let me clarify the issues here, since one correspondent in the Sun insisted that it was impossible for top Western scientists to be crooked or to plagiarise—since the community would come to know. Thus, eventually, my ideas about functional differential equations did receive Western endorsement, at the highest level, but in an ironical repeat of history after a century. In 2005, on the centenary of Einstein’s relativity paper, a former president of the Royal Society, Michael Atiyah, in his Einstein lecture repeated my claim about functional differential equations leading to a paradigm shift in physics. Though my book has been in the libraries of Cambridge and Edinburgh, though scholars from both places were present during the Groningen debate, and though my position on Einstein had also been widely publicised in the press and the Internet, though the ideas in my 2004 paper had been widely circulated, Atiyah claimed to be unaware of all this, and passed off the new theory as his own suggestion. However, this case is easier to settle than even the absurd claim that Copernicus “independently rediscovered” the work of Ibn Shatir whose translated book was in the Vatican library he visited. Thus, Atiyah was immediately informed⁴⁸ of my prior work. Nevertheless, there was a second attempt to assign credit to Atiyah for this paradigm shift in physics, by naming it “Atiyah’s hypothesis”. This was done in a prominent article written in consultation with Atiyah,⁴⁹ and published⁵⁰ in 2006 in a very widely read journal.

When I repeatedly objected, a brief acknowledgment to my work was published,⁵¹ but without any apology, and by suppressing critical facts. I naturally objected that (a) this suppressed the fact that this was the second attempt to wrongly credit Atiyah, and (b) that naming it “Atiyah’s hypothesis” after that was not only bad history, it was bad physics, since functional differential equations are a natural consequence of relativity, and need no hypothesis. The editor refused to publish my letter, despite a petition signed by many academics,⁵² that I should have a right to reply, and despite the error which it corrected. The American Mathematical Society upheld this editorial freedom to suppress inconvenient facts. Clearly, defending Atiyah’s authority was more important to them than the truth about functional differential equations in physics. So much for the superstitious faith of the colonised in the utopian nature of Western scientific authority. (Subsequently, three experts of the Society for Scientific Values upheld my claim, and found a prima facie case against Atiyah, as reported on the website of the society,⁵³ but I will skip the further details.)

To summarise, the religious bias in Western mathematics crept into Western science via Newtonian physics:⁵⁴ Newton’s misunderstanding of the calculus ended up making time metaphysical. Both the nomenclature of “laws”, and the content are inherently and manifestly defective, and led to the failure of Newtonian physics, and its replacement by relativity. However, the full implications of that failure remained hidden for a century since (a) they were not comprehended by Einstein, a patent clerk, who grabbed credit for relativity; (b) he hence became a symbol of Western authority, and science, in practice, amounts to blind belief in Western authority and its system of endorsements. Decolonising the physics syllabus requires us to introduce functional differential equations, and reject Einstein as the originator of relativity. The latter is also necessary for decolonisation to demonstrate the long-term failure of the Western authority in science. The epistemic test demonstrates that Einstein copied, but for the layperson, establishing this requires us to get into the question of Einstein’s personal credibility, which is very doubtful, if assessed dispassionately, and after setting aside the prior influence of the grand stories about him.

However, the colonised mind, deliberately kept mathematically and scientifically illiterate by colonial education, responds in one or both of the following ways to this attempt to set it free. (1) It pleads ignorance of relativity and demits the curriculum to Western-endorsed “experts” naively neglecting the conflict of interests this involves. (2) It rushes to “save” the Einstein story, since it has internalised reverence to the West through such symbol of scientific authority and overlooks how such symbols were exploited since Macaulay. Thus, it resists freedom.

To ignore the curriculum change I am suggesting in science, to ignore my published research and struggles over the last two decades, to ignore the significance of the paradigm shift I have proposed, to ignore the conclusive evidence I have brought out against Einstein as a plagiarist, to ignore the subsequent colonial attempts to appropriate credit for my work, to brush it all under the carpet of a purported ad hominem attack as Ramani does, not only adds insult to injury, not only does it detract from the gravity of the issues I have raised, it is the stock way in which the colonised elite endorses and supports colonial processes, of the kind inflicted on J. C. Bose, for colonialism could hardly have functioned without the internalised support of the colonised elite. That “soft power”, or the ability to control the minds of the elite in the former colonies, remains the key to the Western agenda of establishing global hegemony today.