Western Science and the Indian Connection

On The Connection Between Scientists and the Vedas

I would like to share a few things I came across few years ago that made me question many things, and above all made me feel like there has to be more to India than what it seems like.

• The famous Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr was a follower of the Vedas. He said, “I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.”

• Heisenberg stated, “Quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta.”

• Albert Einstein regularly read the Bhagavad Gita: “When I read the Bhagavad-gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous… I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

• Robert Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit in 1933 and read the Bhagavad-gita in the original, citing it later as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life: “The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.”

• Nikola Tesla understood the great power of Zero Point Field or Akasha or Ether: the power of space between the electrons and the nucleus. Vivekanda’s effect on Tesla was so great that he became vegetarian, celibate and started using Sanskrit words.

• In the 1920’s quantum mechanics was created by the three great minds: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger, who all read from and greatly respected the Vedas, the ancient Indian Sanskrit texts on spirituality. They elaborated upon these ancient books of wisdom in their own language and with modern mathematical formulas in order to try to understand the ideas that are to be found throughout the Vedas, referred to in the ancient Sanskrit as “Brahman,” “Paramatma,” “Akasha” and “Atman.” As Schrödinger said, “some blood transfusion from the East to the West to save Western science from spiritual anaemia.”

After coming across all this i began to ask myself-

-why do we mainly study only about economists and philosophers from the west? Does India have none that match?

- why did colonial powers want to translate all our texts? Was there something they saw in it that we didn't?

- why did many scientists learn Sanskrit?

- if so much of western science is based on the philosophy developed in India, why in our heads do we consider it religious text and not philosophy?

- what is greater? An idea or the one who implements the idea? (I still can't decide on this one)

- there are theories that Indians were purposely made to not value their own culture and millions of dollars are pumped into the country even today to keep the debate of secularism alive so that we're busy with religious debate that take us nowhere, that the founding fathers of our constitution did not add the word secularism in our constitution because they believed India was by nature secular and adding the word would mean that somebody could remove it too.

-There are also viewpoints suggesting that the world powers didn't think India could survive post-independence because it was so diverse. The world was waiting for us to break into small states, all wanting to be independent. I don't want to delve into whether or not this is true, but if it were true who have benefited the most out of this?

I am still an Atheist/ Agnostic / Non-believer of god, and honestly philosophy as a subject doesn't interest me too much but I question because something tells me, there is more to this country than what meets the eye. People who like philosophy should look into such things and find for us all what we could learn from all this. And most importantly, why did the entire world want to conquer India throughout history? What did they see here that we don’t?

Vedas and Upanishas-  The Base of Entire Western Science?