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Comment by dilanj | Hacker News Reader

No disrespect, but to assume there must be smaller and smaller particles than atoms and there must have been universes before ours is probably much more obvious and comforting than trying to think up wave mechanics or explain singularity.

Scientifically, your dads words carry no more merit than that old lady who thought "its the turtles all the way" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

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None taken. My dad is a writer by profession (he was a technical writer while I was young, and that lead me to computers and programming). He is by no means scientific in anything he says or does and he always taught me and my siblings to think for ourselves and never take anything as fact simply because someone said so.

I was just sharing that I thought it was amazing how there are texts (the Vedas) that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that basically state as fact the very stuff people are discovering today. Most people would agree that it's absurd to say that people even one thousand years ago knew about atoms and the big bang, and yet there seem to be books that say they did.

My dad does appear to assume a lot of stuff, and we have argued (debated) on topics for hours and hours. But as someone who believes that it's statistically guaranteed that we're not alone in the universe, I also believe it's equally as probable that people knew about, and wrote about, stuff we're "discovering" today.

" ... here are texts (the Vedas) that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that basically state as fact the very stuff people are discovering today. "

There's a huge difference between a broad claim to there being things smaller than we can see and specifically describing these things ands how they interact.

These texts are thousands of years old and they say something about reality that isn't wrong! There were thousands of years of religion following that get the nature of reality wrong.

I have no idea what point you are trying to make.

I think you are correct, in fact this is common, at least to historians. It doesn't take many generations for knowledge to be lost. Look at how much is reinvented and rediscovered every so many years in computer programming :)

http://www.ams.org/mathmedia/archive/03-2007-media.html

There is also thought to be connections between ancient Taoist texts and physics.

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