Hindu units of time

en.wikipedia.org

19 points·airavat··7 comments

Fun (but only marginally-related) fact: In Hindi, the words for tomorrow and yesterday are the same, the meaning is inferred from context. Also, the words for "day-after-tomorrow" and "day-before-yesterday" are the same!

by the way, Hindi has same word for lunch and dinner too.

what's the word? I speak Hindi, but not very proficiently.

Relevance? Interpretation?

I'm a fan of the Babylonian system myself. Days, hours, minutes, seconds. 360, 12, 60, 60; keep dividing the circle.

And the 5.25 days? Those are holy, outside of normal time. It works.

I guess the relevance come from

"The current Universe was created in Padma kalpa, the last day Kalpa of 50 th year of Bramha.This is 10.51 billion years ago.This figure is close to modern estimated 13.78 billion years."

But now the question is was it pure luck that the ancient humans came up with a number that is close to the current scientific values or is there something that is lost in time. May be they were advanced than us and we just don't know. Of course, no evidence = grain of salt.

Carl Sagan talks about this in his series "Cosmos": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq5qojfB4P0

Here's a wild speculation that I wonder has anything behind it. I think some of these calculations are based on "alignments" of planets (in a straight line etc.) The origin of the universe would be such an alignment, assuming the big bang. Does anyone know if there is such an attempted explanation for such accurate estimates of time in the Indian (and perhaps Mayan and Babylonian) systems?

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