India scientists dismiss Einstein theories | Hacker News Reader

India scientists dismiss Einstein theories

bbc.com

16 pointsZeljkoS25 comments

No wiring have been found to date in excavations of Indian sites. Irrefutable proof that they had wireless karmic communication.

These are the folks who have been running our country for the past 5 years. The other party, congress, is a party of sycophants trying to upstage each other by their degree of sycophancy toward their party president that typically has come from a single family. In the current govt, its the "scientists" who try to out sycophant the other in legitimizing the current govt's beliefs to win favors. It helps them that a significant part of the population believes in that shit.

So here we are, caught betweent a rock and a hard place.

Brazil is going on the same path with the new presidency.

“It helps them that a significant part of the population believes in that shit.”

An Indian past colleague of mine who is highly educated with a PhD in CS from a western country truly believed in the conspiracy theory that Indian gods were aliens and space travel was common during those days. It was horrifying to know that such highly educated scientist believed in such unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

The amount of misinformation that spreads in India because of WhatsApp is truly scary and people believe it because “it was on WhatsApp”

My father (not a scientist, but a successful businessman) has been making such claims about ancient Hindu texts for the last 40 years. I've always wondered how otherwise educated people succumb to such obvious metaphorical myths. Perhaps the current trend is partly cultural insecurity but mostly scientific/epistemic illiteracy.

Part of the reason is that the 'humanism' movement that was instrumental in separating the church from the state in Europe during Renaissance was not uniformly replicated in India. It did happen in pockets, Bengal, Maharashtra were some of these pockets but this phenomena was not uniformly distributed.

Gandhi, for instance, believed that nothing ever good came out of the European civilization and its ideas. If you take such a stance you cant learn from them. His views were in stark contrast to, say, Tagore who had no problems in acknowledging the good parts while attacking the bad. What amuses me is that that banning of the practice of sati - burning of widows on the stake -- was strongly influenced by Muslim literature from Muslim golden age, the Mutazils to be precise. RamMohan Roy the chief figure in getting the practice abolished was a scholar of Persian literature and of course Mutazil literature. Its amusing because Islam is the current poster child of everything retrogressive.

Back to Renaissance, had Europe not retrogressed Renaissance would not have been necessary. The same holds for India.

BTW I am in admiration of the fact that you can talk about something that's this close to home.

My father, a scientist was heading a governmental body at the time of the previous BJP government headed by Vajpayee. He run a foul of them. He was being coerced in to scientifically endorsing that artifacts from ayodhya, bricks, to be particular, were from Ram's times. He refused to do so as those bricks indicated quite something else. It was a very trying time for our family. I have my full sympathies and respect for those who stand up against a corrupt government be it intellectual corruption or corruption of some other kind. I have immense respect for my father because given what he was going through I am not sure I would have made the same choices that he made. I would like to believe that I would have been as honest and upright but since I was not in the center of that harrasment I sincerely dont know what trade offs I would have made. This is the first time I have ever spoken about this to anyone.

Misleading headline by BBC. The very first sentence in the article is this: "Indian scientists have hit out at speakers at a major science conference for making irrational claims."

A major science conference at which other Indian scientists absolutely repudiated Newton and Einstein, and pushed Von Daniken style theories about ancient Vedic aircraft and stem cell technology.

So clearly there are scientists in India who are fighting the good fight for scientific rigor and accountability, but this is in the context of ruling party politicians making comments pushing these sorts of crackpot theories in support of a nationalist glorification agenda. There is currently plenty of reason to worry about the politicization of science in India.

I don’t consider these folks scientists.

What you consider or dont is irrelevant. They are speaking from a premier platform that represents the country's scientific progress.

Yes there are flat-earthers in the US, but they dont speak from the podium of the most premier scientific platform of their country. Trump himself is another matter, in fact there are some parallels between Modi and Trump.

Of course this corruption of a science conference is a serious concern but what BBC is doing with its misleading headline is to painting all “India” scientists with a broad brush when they (as well as HN readers) should be supporting the real scientists who are aghast at what is going on.

There are indeed lots of parallels between the two men.

Completely agree about BBC's bias. Hopefully articles such as these will create enough outrage and some good will come out of it. I doubt it though.

Its important to expose these guys and make people uncomfortable enough, have their ego hurt enough so that they feel compelled to respond. So in a backhanded way BBC is doing a good thing.

There is also the question of how the headline is read. Is it read as 'all Indian' scientists or Some whose nationality happen to be Indian. Given that its being broadcast from a forum called the "Indian Science Congress" I cannot honestly complain because that platform is intended to speak for India and its scientists.

Sp you agree about the BBCs bias, but you also can't honestly complain. I do agree with your point that it's important to expose this issue and I think the BBC did a good job here. Headlines are necessarily short and the very first sentence in the article makes it perfectly clear there is disagreement on this among scientists in India and there are scientists with integrity fighting the good fight for science. In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly.

"In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly."

Surely you jest.

An April, 2016 academic study of bit.ly links shared on Twitter to BBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times and Huffington Post articles found that 59 percent of the links were never clicked. And another study of push-through news alerts to mobile phones found that “People click on the alert about half the time.”

Source: https://honestreporting.com/tag/misleading-headlines/

What this means is most people only read the headline and not even the first line.

True story: a group of Indian scientists with sense criticize a right-wing group of pseudo-scientists making outlandish claims.

Impression left by BBC headline: Indian scientists are wack

Like, come on. One could do the same by compiling the views of every ridiculous theory espoused by people like Ben "grain silos" Carson or young earth creationists in America and write "American scientists dismiss reason". Are there a significant amount of people that believe nonsense like this? Sure, maybe. Is that representative of American scientists as a whole? Of course not.

And it's the same thing here. I guarantee you a biology grad student at some place like IIT is under no delusions about the origins of stem cell research.

I don't know how anyone could interpret the headline as referring to all Indian scientists.

Personally I'm more bothered by why it says "India scientists" instead of "Indian scientists".

I dont find the headline misleading at all.

"Some academics at the annual Indian Science Congress, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, publicly dismissed the discoveries of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein."

Yeah some scientists are calling them out, but that does not take away the fact that such crackpot ideas are being proselytized by the speakers at one of the premier venues of "science"

Still, the headline is misleading. Indian scientists are calling out these speakers for their nonsense theories. An academic that rejects scientific methods is not a scientist. Unless “scientist” too has become just another meaningless term.

Question is how did such crackpot views get broadcasted from such a scientific platform in the first place.

Yes some scientists are speaking out but they werent exactly unaware of the speakers beliefs, yet the speakers were invited to be the speakers. Shows how much importance and inflence these scientists, who are speaking, out have.

Note these speakers are not riff-raffs either, they are academics holding important academic positions, they got promoted to these positions. Lending support to these ideas likely had a thing or two to do with the promotions.

Now imagine which kind of scientists will get the government grants, the vedic helicopter running on cow piss or the other kind.

Also imagine the motivation level of a indian scientist in USA or Europe to come back to india and take up an academic position unless of course they happen to subscribe to such ideas.

Of course, they were the first to discover and invent. They just lost all of the learnings somewhere in the past, presumably to a server crash.

Did you read anything before making the claim?

> "We don't subscribe to their views and distance ourselves from their comments. This is unfortunate," Premendu P Mathur, general secretary of Indian Scientific Congress Association, told AFP news agency.

BBC always have an agenda when it comes to India.

> BBC always have an agenda when it comes to India.

Yes they do but its not that they are lying here. These are the ideas that are being spread from a premier platform.

BTW I am sure cyberjunkie was being sarcastic.

Agreed but there was no need for such a provocative and misleading headline.

Well, if the shoe fits...

Sanskrit being mother of most modern languages, including European. There must be a scientific reason why Sanskrit was declared the best language for Computers by NASA. Dwarika cities were discovered intact under seabed proving Indian civilisation is the oldest in the world and was far ahead even 12,000-32,000 years ago. It is clear that there is science in many rituals of Karama based Hindu Vedas, rituals, food, Yoga etc. It is not surprising the claim Indian scientists are making. On the other hand, in a Mahabharata speak, Britain would be called a land of daemons on the basis of the murder, loot, suppression and hijacking of cultures of its colonies. British would like world to believe that sun actually shines out of their backside.

The Arabic countries led by the Muslims were the most advanced scientists/engineers in the world, until they let the religious crazies take over. Just saying Indian ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engine...

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