Joseph Needham (1900-1995)

[KALKI]

Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is famous mainly for the formidable magnitude and scholarship of his work on science in China. He impressed by the achievements of India in the field of knowledge and learning.

He comments on the Indian fascination with perpetual motion, 'to seek the ultimate origin or predisposition of the Indian conviction in the profoundly Hindu world view of endless cyclical change, kalpa and mahakalpas succeeding one another in self-sufficient and unwearying round. For Hindus as well as Taoists, the universe itself was a perpetual motion machine."

(source: The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society - By Richard Lannoy p. 292).

In his lecture to the students of Cambridge University in 1963 he gave full compliments to India's intellectual heritage. He said, 'it is good to remember, therefore, that our own pious founders were not the only men, and that Christendom was not the only culture, to set on foot great and noble institutions of learning where successive generations of students assembled to get the benefits of education and research. When the men of Alexander the Great came to Taxila in India in the fourth century BC they found a university the like of which had not then been seen in Greece… and was still existing when the Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hsien went there about AD 400.

(source: infinityfoundation.com).

"....Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Samkhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadim paramanu,etc.), including also biological speculations...When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises....."

(source: Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1500-1972 - by Claude Alphonso Alvares p. 69 - 70).