Brahmagupta-II gave ‘law of gravity’ before Newton, claims Rajasthan education minister

Rajasthan education minister Vasudev Devnani claimed that the law of gravitation was discovered by Brahmagupta the second, a thousand years before Isaac Newton.

Devnani made the statement while speaking at the 72nd foundation day celebrations of the University of Rajasthan on Monday.

A few days ago, I was reading about Newton...who came up with the law of gravitation? Newton did, this is what I read, you read. If you delve deeper, Bramhagupta the second had given us this rule a thousand years before Newton," said Devnani.

"Why don't we include it in our curriculum?" he asked. "The mechanism was, of course, developed later by modern scientists. We'll teach that, too, but such topics have to be made suitable for India."

This is not the first time Devani has made such remarks.

In 2015, he said Mughal emperor Akbar would lose the tag of "the great" in school textbooks to his contemporary Maharana Pratap. Devnani also wanted to give greater importance to Indian scientists Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya than to the theories of Newton and Pythagoras.

In 2017, the minister had claimed that the cow was the only animal that exhales oxygen and claimed he had read this on research websites.

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