Did ANCIENT INDIA beat NEWTON to Gravity 🤔| Reality Check 🧐

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Dive into a journey that challenges everything you thought you knew about gravity. We trace the earliest hints of gravitational ideas from the works of Aryabhata and Bhaskara II, then pit them against Newton’s groundbreaking Principia. Prepare to uncover surprising parallels, hidden manuscripts, and the true origins of the law that shapes our universe.  In this video, you’ll learn: - How 5th- and 12th-century Indian scholars described gravitational pull   - The mathematical insights that foreshadowed Newton’s universal gravitation   - What really counts as “discovering” gravity in a historical context   🎙️ Produced Using AI Technologies:       Scriptwriting & Research: ChatGPT (OpenAI) + Me      Narration & Voice AI: ElevenLabs      Visual Generation: Leonardo AI      Conceptual Video Sequences: Sora by OpenAI      Editing & Compilation: Adobe After Effects + Premiere Pro

Transcript

00:00We all know the story of Isaac Newton and the apple.

00:03In a flash of genius, he connected a falling apple to the orbiting moon,

00:08and boom, the universal law of gravitation was born.

00:12It's a story that has been the bedrock of science for over 300 years.

00:18But what if that's not the whole story?

00:20What if the core idea of gravity was written down in ancient India

00:25more than a thousand years before Newton?

00:27What if the secret of gravity wasn't first discovered under an English apple tree,

00:33but was chanted in ancient Sanskrit verses?

00:37Long before Newton, thinkers in ancient India were looking to the skies.

00:42While early texts contained poetic hints of a downward pull,

00:47the first real scientific steps came later.

00:51In the 5th century CE, the great astronomer Aryabhata

00:54declared the earth was a spinning sphere.

00:58This raised a question.

01:00Why don't people on the other side fall off?

01:04His analogy was a round Kadamba flower,

01:07with people clinging to it like petals,

01:10suggesting a force pulling toward the center.

01:12A century later, Brahma-gupta took it further,

01:17stating clearly that it is the nature of the earth to attract things.

01:22It was a solid description of gravity as an attractive force,

01:26but it wasn't yet a universal mathematical law.

01:30The strongest case for an ancient Indian discovery of gravity

01:35comes from the 12th century mathematician Bhaskaracharya II.

01:41In his masterpiece, Siddhanta Siromani,

01:44he wrote about the earth's attractive property,

01:48giving it a name, Gurutvakarsan Shakti.

01:51The name itself is a giveaway,

01:54Gurutva for heaviness and Akarshan for attraction.

01:59He wrote that objects fall to earth because of this force.

02:03In a huge conceptual leap,

02:05he also suggested this same attraction

02:08holds the planets and other celestial bodies in their orbits.

02:12This was a remarkably advanced understanding,

02:15describing an attractive force that not only keeps us on the ground,

02:19but also works in the heavens.

02:22So, did Bhaskara beat Newton?

02:26To answer that, we have to look at what their ideas allowed us to do.

02:31First, the concept of attraction.

02:34Both described a force pulling things to earth.

02:38On this, ancient Indian thought was centuries ahead.

02:43Second, universality.

02:45Bhaskara suggested the force held celestial bodies in orbit.

02:49But his focus was mainly on the earth.

02:53Newton's genius was in declaring the law was truly universal.

02:57Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle.

03:01The apple pulls the earth, just as the earth pulls the apple.

03:07Third, and this is the game changer, the math.

03:12Bhaskara described gravity with words.

03:15Newton described it with an equation.

03:17This formula changed everything.

03:26It wasn't just an idea, it was a predictive tool.

03:31Suddenly, we could calculate the orbits of planets,

03:34the rhythm of the tides, and the paths of comets.

03:38That predictive power is what separates Newton's work as a scientific revolution.

03:44So, why isn't Bhaskaracharya as famous as Newton?

03:49There's no evidence Newton ever knew of his work.

03:52He built on the theories of European scientists like Galileo and Kepler.

03:57The point isn't that Newton stole the idea.

04:01The real conversation is about recognizing a parallel stream of incredible thinking that has been largely overlooked.

04:10The work of Indian scholars shows a deep scientific tradition that laid down crucial pieces of the gravity puzzle

04:17centuries before these ideas were common knowledge in Europe.

04:22So, did ancient India beat Newton to gravity?

04:26The answer isn't a simple yes or no.

04:30If the question is, who first conceived of a force of attraction pulling things to Earth?

04:36The credit largely goes to Indian thinkers like Brahmagupta, and especially Bhaskaracharya.

04:43They figured out the what.

04:44But if the question is, who defined gravity as a universal, measurable, and mathematical law

04:51that unlocked the machinery of the cosmos?

04:54That credit belongs to Isaac Newton.

04:57He gave us the how much.

05:00The story of gravity isn't about one man and an apple.

05:04It's a global story, with chapters written in Sanskrit and in Latin.

05:09Acknowledging all of them just gives us a richer, more complete picture of science.

05:14Thanks for listening to Isaac Newton.

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