We also give an impression to our students that science, in its present form, is the greatest of all times, and never let them know that the science that we know today is only great compared to the mediaeval dark ages before the 17th Century in Europe. There have been great scientific thoughts in the past, both in our country, and also in other parts like Egypt and China, when the West was still writing nursery rhymes. To give only a few examples, the value of zero (Shunya), the concept of the wheel, pulley, mechanical tools of even the Indian epic times of Mahabharatha and Ramayana, the Indian steel( which even the British thought was far superior to theirs, when they first made), the fine cloth that we used to produce, the architecture of India of yore and many others. The great achievements of today’s science pale into insignificance if one cares to study our ancient wisdom in this field. Even the ice packing, which the West claims came from Sir Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, was known to us Centuries earlier. In fact Sir Francis was not a scientist at all in the present sense of the word. He was a trained Barrister, who accidentally taught the West the mantra of experimentation. The western idea of Arabic numerals were not accurate. They were called Hindsa in Arabia, meaning originating in India, long before the West knew about them.

The Bell’s theorem was successfully experimented by Clauser, Freedman, and David Bohm in 1972, and later by Alain Aspect in 1985. The world of modern science now believes in the unifying theory of this Universe. The discovery of the holistic background for modern science has made scientists to accept the holistic view, and in medicine this concept is going to make a world of difference to patient care in the future. Even Einstein did conceive of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). Max Plank, the father of Quantum Physics, wrote his book Where is Science going? in 1933, and in the preface to the book, Einstein wrote that Professor Plank was inspired by the " hunger of the soul". The paper Observer commented " Professor Plank is such a great scientist that he can transcend the limits of his own science, and inquire into the philosophical implications" because Plank admitted in his book that " we are always struggling from the relative to the Absolute".

We have missed what Swami Vivekananda wrote years earlier " Physics is bounded on both sides by meta-physics- it starts with non-reason and ends with non-reason". He went on " we only know a little of man, and so very little of Nature, when we know more about man, we will know more about the Universe." Stephen Hawkings would want to have a God-less Universe, but he failed to invent one, and admitted " a knowledge of the edge of the Universe would give the complete theory, as otherwise we can not solve all the equations. It is very difficult to prove that there is no edge. One could define God as the edge of the Universe, who was the agent responsible for setting all these into motion."

" The ancient Indian astronomy believes in the existence of two grihas Rahu and Ketu ( entities apparently circling round the earth) which are not material things like the planets of the modern parlance. They are, in fact, imaginary geometrical points: the points of intersection of the sun’s ecliptic and the circle of the moon’s orbit. Even in modern days we make use of imaginary points and lines ( north pole, south pole, equator etc. on the earth’s surface) for describing terrestrial geography. By invoking the Rahu and the Ketu, the ancients were able to explain in a self consistent way in those days astronomical parlance, and then deduce the then astronomical data, including those of the phenomenon of eclipses. The concept of Rahu and Ketu in ancient days is thus obvious, despite the fact that they are not detectable with a telescope and are, therefore, ignored in modern astronomy." said a thinking nuclear physicist, Dr.Ardendhu Shekar Ghosh, who was with the BARC for a long time. He is a Ph.D. from Sorbonne, and worked at the Madame Curie Institute in the fifties, before joining the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

Now we will look at the superstitions. Lot of loose talk goes on in the so called scientific drawing room gossip about superstitions. I have a feeling that we have not given this a very serious thought, a scientific inquiry. Let us, for the purpose of this paper, confine ourselves to the common superstitions like the Rahu kala, Amavaasya, Shankramana, Bharani, Krithikai only. These are of no value today and have to be discarded and not encouraged. I could not agree more! But before we condemn them let us do a bit of research into their origin, and judge them in that context. To do that one must have a good and critical look at the world affairs, and also the knowledge of men and matters obtaining in the hoary past. I think for a novice in the field a good comprehensive guide will be the wonderful book by the great French historian, considered in France as the guru of historians, Fernand Braudel, A history of Civilizations, an English translation of which is available from Penguin Classics ( Penguin Publications, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England). Let us confine ourselves only to certain areas.

Take the "great" works of art like The Taj Mahal, The Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China. All these were built with a passion, of may be one or two powerful men, who were very rich those days and consequently very powerful. It is power that rules the world anyway! They employed millions of poor labourers for these buildings, without any labour laws governing their welfare. They were paid hardly anything and made to work continuously for days on end. Many lives were sacrificed in building these so called monuments. If our younger generation was made to realise the human cost of those they will not longer look at them with pleasure but with great disdain for human ego and money power. The other side of the coin of these monuments is very dark indeed. Let us for a minute put ourselves in those unfortunate labourer’s shoes and we will very soon realise the gravity of the situation. Similar, though to a lesser extent were the fate of millions of poor people who built the monuments nearer home in South of India as well.

I think( this is not Fernand Braudel’s thought) that there were compassionate men even at that time who were, possibly, also close to the seat of power. They must have thought of this ingenious plan of inventing the inauspicious timings and foreboding that make the building of the monuments dangerous during those times, thus giving the poor labourers some respite from their gruelling task. If we observe these superstitions carefully all of them are not in vogue in any given place at a time. If Rahu kalam is prevalent in Tamil Nadu area, the Bharani Krithikai are very common in our district. This again is related to the local circumstances. To give it an aura of importance the names like Rahu and Ketu were borrowed. Dr. Gosh has already given us the reason why the above concepts came into practice in the first place. Today we have labour laws, plenty of holidays, many of us do not work at all. We may have to invent auspicious timings that bring good fortune if we work at those timings and more people may be goaded to work at least during those times. It is unscientific to condemn any concept without going deep into its root. This kind of science falls into what is called today in respectable jargon as observational research or qualitative research in contrast to the conventional quantitative research.

Let us look at another common superstition in our part of the country where certain segment of people do what is called "Chitra- upaasana", where they take small quantities of water thrice, before starting to eat a meal. Looks ridiculous from our "scientific" angle. But look at its beauty. Oesophagus, the tube that carries food from the mouth to the stomach is a potentially closed tube and the food has to go through it by peristalsis. This is fecilitated by small amount of water in the beginning, better than our first swallowing solid morsel of food, the latter might sometimes give an unpleasant sensation of obstruction in the throat. This scientific fact must have been known to our ancestors who devised this technic in the name of God to give it better sanctity and made it a common practice for the good of all concerned. See the scientific background of a common superstition.

Now let us find out how scientific inquiry could be done in this field. There is a nice and a mile stone study of this published in the British Medical Journal recently, entitled Friday, the Thirteenth. Friday is not an auspicious day for Christians. If it falls on the thirteenth of the month it is said to be very bad and a lot of people observe this even today in the advanced West. This study was computerised and well controlled. It looked at all the Fridays falling on the 13th of a month in the last five years for two incidents viz: deaths and admission rates for emergencies in Northwestern region of London hospitals and also the accidents and deaths on the motor way M 25. There were a total of 20 Fridays in five years falling on the 13th of a month. They were compared with the same statistics on another day for 20 days in those five years, properly matched for season of the year etc. The results were very interesting. 50% of people on those bad Fridays did not use the road, and stayed home. Despite that death and accident rates went up four times on those Fridays. The emergency admission rates had doubled in the hospitals and also sudden deaths were twice as many. The study concluded, applying the most modern ststistical methods, that Friday the thirteenth was definitely bad for at least fifty per cent of the people in England. The other 50% of Britons still believed in this superstition. Take it or leave it, but they have given it a very scientific testing, all the same. If we do this kind of inquiry and then condemn anything, it becomes very scientific. Simply condemning is very unscientific.

The present day science is at times dehumanising. Look at what happened during the second World War. Three Jewish physicists were driven out of Germany by Hitler’s army, and they had no job but were staying together in Birmingham in an out-house. They would never have come together in Germany as they their own petty jealousies. Now that they were together they were able to find out a simpler solution to the problem of hydrogen bomb base of U 235. While Einstein had written to President Roosevelt that it would take 40 pounds of the raw material to make a bomb, these three came up with a new equation where only one pound of U 235 could make a very powerful bomb. The result was the total destruction of humanity in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It may look very distant to many of us, but they were human beings like us who died in agony with all their worldly belongings. Those scientists were Otto Frisch, Francis Simon and Rudolph Peierls. Rudolph was very disturbed about the possibility, but kept quiet as he was made the Professor of Theoretic Physics in the Oxford University. It did not matter to him if thousands died elsewhere! This kind of inhuman science disturbs me very much. It was Martin Luther King Jr., who said " Science without a touch of humanity will sink man into the valley of moral nihilism; but, he warned, absence of scientific bent of mind will sink man into the valley of illogicalism". How true. We need to have scientific temper, but that does not mean condemning all that we do not know. Science is curiosity. Let us develop an educational system which encourages our future generation to be curious about the Universe.

In summary let me share with you my experience of sharing my thoughts with a group of high school students recently. I agreed to answer their questions. One girl from the 6th standard asked the most interesting question. " We take rest when we are tired, but the heart which works continuously may also feel tired. When does that take rest?" A million dollar question. The following day I asked the same question to my postgraduate students, only to find that they were non-plussed by the question. They had never thought about it at all. Where is the scope for thinking in this era of learning byheart and vomiting the same in the examinations? I hope we will be able to change that scenario. " This Universe is wonderful wonder" said Einstein. We only understand some aspect of the working of this wonderful Universe. Let us be humble to learn.