NEW: Racist Newton didn't discover Gravity!

[Arun Gupta]

Not to excuse the mangling of history, but to point out some things :

1. That Harappan culture declined for reasons other than Aryan invasions
   can be found in e.g., Jonathan Mark Kenoyer's book, and e.g., the Asia
   Society & Pakistan Govt. exhibition in New York (1997) on the Indus
   Valley civilization.  There are hardly saffronites.

2. From Alberuni, chapter XXVI "So Brahmagupta says : "Scholars have
   declared that the globe of the earth is in the midst of heaven...we
   say the earth on all its sides is the same; all people on earth stand
   upright, and all heavy things fall to the earth by a law of nature..."
   The inverse square law occurred to people other than Newton as well,
   Newton's genius was in being able to use the law to calculate orbits.

3. Pythagoras' Theorem was known much before him. Follow links from :
   http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/DigitalMathArchive/Euclid/java/html/babylon.html
   "There is evidence that Pythagoras' Theorem was discovered very early by
   the Chinese and the Indians (refer to Heath's discussion just after I.47),
   but exactly how early is not known. The earliest tangible record of
   Pythagoras' Theorem comes from Babylonian tablets dating to around
   1000 B.C."  [several hundred years before Pythagoras.]

4. Re: J.C. Bose and Marconi : you may want to look at
   http://www.frontlineonline.com/fl1506/15060810.htm
   Marconi used in his experiments a receiver invented by Bose.
   Since then, the IEEE has recognized Bose's contributions
   (there was a feature in Spectrum as well) in wave propagation;
   the new edition of "Antennas" by John D. Kraus (a standard text
   in the field) also references Bose's papers in Chapter One
   (thanks, RP !).

5. The origin of chess is a vexed question, but as far as I know,
   India and China are the front-runners, Persia is not in the picture;
   Persian history itself names chess as an import.

-Arun Gupta