The Truth of Vedic Physics

Age of Earth, Gravity, and Speed of Light in Bronze Age India

In 1956, Claire Patterson of the California Institute of Technology or Caltech made a groundbreaking discovery about the age of Earth using a technique called radiometric dating. At the time, scientists had already known for over half a century that certain elements spontaneously release radiation and transform into lighter elements through a process known as radioactive decay. Uranium, for example, decays into lead over millions of years through a series of intermediate elements. The rate of this decay is predictable, allowing scientists to measure the ratio of uranium to lead in a rock and calculate how long the process has been occurring. Since Earth’s oldest rocks are often altered or destroyed over time, Patterson turned to meteorites—space rocks formed at the same time as Earth and largely unchanged since. By analyzing the uranium and lead in meteorites, Patterson determined that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, a figure that has since been confirmed by further studies and remains widely accepted today.

Earlier attempts to estimate Earth’s age, such as those by Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century, suggested it was much younger—around 20 to 40 million years—based on the rate at which Earth was losing heat. Back in the seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher of Ireland famously calculated that Earth was “created” in 4004 BC, which suggests an Earth age of around 6,000 years, based on genealogies in the Bible. But thousands of years ago, the Atharva Veda had already calculated a value that matches, with remarkable approximation, the value accepted by the scientific community today. Naysayers dismiss it as motivated Hindutva interpretation with no basis in reality.

Similarly, India’s Vedic ancients had also discovered other values crucial to modern physics, like the speed of light and gravity, long before there even was physics. Again, scholarship stands divided on the topic with one side standing by the claims and holding them as Vedic India’s scientific supremacy, and the other dismissing it wholesale as a late Hindutva fabrication out of political and ideological motivations. Both cannot be right. With this investigation, we hope to find out just which one is. Read with an open, apolitical, and irreligious mind, for truth follows reason and reason is not beholden to religion. As always, we shall examine multiple works by multiple scholars from both sides of the aisle in the interest of objectivity and completeness.