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Comment by vishal0123 | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know, a more accurate calculation of speed of light was done in ancient india and had been mentioned in rigveda: http://www.hitxp.com/articles/veda/light-speed-rigveda/

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Without a measurement to go with it and without any reason to name one or another number this looks like so much tweaking to work backwards from an answer already known.

All the answers to the worlds questions are in the Qur'an, the Bible and any other manner of ancient texts, if you want to believe that. Pi = 3 right? And what's a cubit?

The problem is that without a procedure to arrive at the 2202 there is little value in this. This is the number that needs an explanation, without a description of an experiment it could be the truth, it could be a lucky guess, or maybe someone thought that if they tweaked the meaning of the various elements in the explanation by a bit here and there they could make it fit the required answer.

There is enough leeway in there that I really don't think this should go with the header you've given it.

What is an interesting question is how the 2202 was arrived at, how much leeway there was for each of the ancient units given and what that implies for the error bars of the answer. That might yield some valuable insight.

In case you are serious, there is no mention of how this calculation was empirically made. It seems much more likely that this is fortuitous teleological translation rather than an actual discovery of the speed of light cryptically hidden away in the Vedas.

The original article referenced by the link above has more information on why the calculation may be authentic and can be found at http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_kak-s_li...

No, those add no empirical support. They mention no derivation of the numbers, no explanation for how they were measured. They don't clarify, beyond the blog post, whether this should be accepted as a discovery or treated as coincidence. They just restate the same coincidence.

Looking at the imprecision of vedical units of time and length the range of what the speed could be is pretty big http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana

But I have to admit it's still stunning that the people had an idea that light travels that "slow" as opposed to infinitely fast.

EDIT: also it seems the calculation for time is wrong, wiki says "30 Kālas are one Muhūrta" and not 30.3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhurta

EDIT 2: Perhaps they learned that light has finite speed from the Arabs who knew already in 11th century thanks to the "first scientist" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen

Vedas are much much older than 11th Century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas)

Yes, but the precise number appears only in the commentary from 14th century

"...Sun (light) traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a nimisha"

Yes, but how did he measure it?

He could know that from someone else. But from whom - is a separate question.

And a useless one. The question is "how did the person who measured it measure it", who reports it isn't that interesting or relevant.

I'd say not useless, but pointless, since we don't have information about that.

Yes, good point.

But an article about antique dimensional analysis is just not on the same level in difficultly or interest as how someone observed a natural phenomenon and explained it with empirical evidence.

Whether it's interesting or not to someone - is their choice. It's interesting for me as a historical example.

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