Indian Atomism and Quantum theory by P. Priyadarshi
interesting article that challenges commonly held ideas about the history of the atom
interesting article that challenges commonly held ideas about the history of the atom
Traditionally, the western authors have been reluctant to accept ancient Indian achievements in science and hence they hold that Democritus was writing physics but the same thing if written by an Indian was metaphysics. (4) This prejudice has been so high that Park sums up, “The Upanishads refer to an imaginary symbolic cosmos. Democritus was talking about the way things really are or (better) might be. These are different worlds of discourse. They cannot be compared.”(5)
Democritus used a naïve logic that you cannot go on cutting something forever and therefore there must be atoms at the end, which you cannot cut any further. On the other hand, the Indians gave a much better logic, “Take a mountain and a molehill, they said. Which has more particles? The mountain, obviously. That means you cannot cut forever, that there is a finite, uncuttable particle. If the particles were infinitesimal, the mountain and the molehill would have equal number of particles, and they would lose any real meaning—again, an assumption but, in a way, more hard minded than Democritus’s guess. And the Indians, unlike Democritus, displayed a rudimentary understanding of infinite sets.” (6) Moreover Indian atomism was older than the Greek atomism, because there is evidence that Pakudha Katyayana, an older contemporary of Buddha taught atomic theory much before the earliest Greek atomic theory. (7)