None of them ever emerged as a crystal clear thought experiment that
could not be evaded in discourse. For that we had to wait for this
century and the development of mathematical rigor.
For some reason it is attractive to some to assign modern
understanding to some distant thinker who may well have been
inflential. Yet all they ever did was to recognize an irreducible
logical argument that merely awaited the obvious question.
The Indian Sage Who
Developed Atomic Theory 2,600 Years Ago
By April
Holloway, www.ancient-origins.net | October 10, 2014
The universe is full
of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond
Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange
phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously
undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
John Dalton (1766 –
1844), an English chemist and physicist, is the man credited today
with the development of atomic theory. However, a theory of
atoms was actually formulated 2,500 years before Dalton by an Indian
sage and philosopher, known as Acharya Kanad.
Acharya Kanad was born
in 600 BC in Prabhas Kshetra (near Dwaraka) in Gujarat, India. His
real name was Kashyap.
Kashyap was on a
pilgrimage to Prayag when he saw thousands of pilgrims litter the
streets with flowers and rice grains, which they offered at the
temple. Kashyap, fascinated by small particles, began collecting the
grains of rice. A crowd gathered around to see the strange man
collecting grains from the street. Kashyap was asked why he was
collecting the grains that even a beggar wouldn’t touch. He told
them that individual grains in themselves may seem worthless, but a
collection of some hundred grains make up a person’s meal, the
collection of many meals would feed an entire family and ultimately
the entire mankind was made of many families, thus even a single
grain of rice was as important as all the valuable riches in this
world. Since then, people began calling him ‘Kanad’, as ‘Kan’
in Sanskrit means ‘the smallest particle’.
Kanad pursued his
fascination with the unseen world and with conceptualising the idea
of the smallest particle. He began writing down his ideas and
teaching them to others. Thus, people began calling him
‘Acharya’ (‘the teacher’), hence the name Acharya Kanad (‘the
teacher of small particles’).
Kanad’s Conception
of Anu (the Atom)
Kanad was walking with
food in his hand, breaking it into small pieces when he realised that
he was unable to divide the food into any further parts, it was too
small. From this moment, Kanad conceptualised the idea of a particle
that could not be divided any further. He called that indivisible
matter Parmanu, or anu (atom).
Acharya Kanad proposed
that this indivisible matter could not be sensed through any human
organ or seen by the naked eye, and that an inherent urge
made one Parmanu combine with another. When two
Parmanu belonging to one class of substance combined, a dwinuka
(binary molecule) was the result.
This dwinuka had
properties similar to the two parent Parmanu.
Kanad suggested that
it was the different combinations of Parmanu which produced different
types of substances. He also put forward the idea that atoms could be
combined in various ways to produce chemical changes in presence of
other factors such as heat. He gave blackening of earthen pot and
ripening of fruit as examples of this phenomenon and the nature of
the universe.
He wrote a book on his
research “Vaisheshik Darshan” and became known as “The Father
of Atomic theory”.
In the West, atomism
emerged in the 5th century BC with the ancient Greeks Leucippus and
Democritus. Whether Indian culture influenced Greek or vice versa or
whether both evolved independently is a matter of dispute.
Kanad is reported to
have said: “Every object of creation is made of atoms which in turn
connect with each other to form molecules”. His theory of the
atom was abstract and enmeshed in philosophy as they were based on
logic and not on personal experience or experimentation. But in the
words of A.L. Basham, the veteran Australian Indologist, “they were
brilliant imaginative explanations of the physical structure of the
world, and in a large measure, agreed with the discoveries of modern
physics”.
Republished with
permission. Rea
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