Aryabhatta knew about gravity before Newton: Former ISRO chief

New Delhi, Feb 21: One of the country's leading scientists and former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair today propounded the theory that some shlokas in the Vedas mentioned about presence of water on the moon and astronomy experts like Aryabhatta knew about gravitational force much before Issac Newton.

The 71-year-old Padma Vibhushan awardee said the Indian vedas and ancient scriptures also had information on metallurgy, algebra, astronomy, maths, architecture and astrology way before the western world knew about them. Speaking at an international conference on Vedas, he however, added that the information in vedas was in a "condensed format" which made it difficult for the modern science to accept it.

"Some sholkas in one of the Vedas say that there is water on the moon but no one believed it. Through our Chandrayaan mission, we could establish that and we were the first ones to find that out," Nair said, adding that everything in Vedas could not be understood as they were in chaste Sanskrit.

He also talked very highly about fifth century astronomer- mathematician Aryabhatta saying, "We are really proud that Aryabhatta and Bhaskara have done extensive work on planetary work and exploration of outer planets. It was one of the challenging fields.

"Even for Chandrayaan, the equation of Aryabhatta was used. Even the (knowledge of) gravitational field... Newton found it some 1500 years later... the knowledge existing (in our scriptures)," he said.

Nair, who was ISRO chairman from 2003-–09, also claimed geometry was used to make calculations for building cities during the Harappan civilisation and the Pythagorean theorem also existed since the vedic period.

The comments by Nair came in the backdrop of many BJP leaders talking about ancient Indian scriptures having scientific information including on plastic surgery as well as aero-dynamics.

PTI