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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