Modern science doesn’t depend on faith, says Nobel laureate

Vishav Bharti

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Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 4

Making a clear distinction between science and faith, eminent biologist and Nobel laureate Prof Venkatraman Ramakrishnan today said that when “we talk about science in Vedas, we don’t know if it was real or was part of mythology”. He was at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.

Though he emphasised that there are a lot of things in the past that Indians should be proud of, especially in the field of mathematics, but when it comes to claims of finding science in Hindu mythology, he had reservations. “I would say modern science depends on not taking anything on faith, but being able to experiment, reproducing the experiment and getting the results. The same results,” he said.

“If you can’t do that, it is not really science,” he said.

Giving an example of the Greeks’ contribution to theorems, he said the evidence of their contribution can be traced throughout the history of mathematics. “For instance, when the Greeks had discovered a lot of theorems, there was a continuous line from that day to today,” he said. “That knowledge was not lost,” he said.

About claims of some Hindu groups of Vedas being the fountainhead of modern science, he said that such claims are immaterial unless a body of knowledge is available to the common pool of knowledge of humanity in a sustainable way. “If you talk about something in Vedas, we don’t know if it was real or was part of mythology or what,” he said.

He also hailed India’s contribution to the modern numbering system. “Indians did great things in the past like the whole modern numbering system with zero was a big contribution to mathematics’ advanced area of equations,” he said.

Prof Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a structural biologist and president of the Royal Society. In 2009, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A Steitz and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK.