The Indian Science Congress that took place earlier this week in Mysuru has drawn flak from many, especially after a paper called ‘Blowing of the Shankh’, was presented by Rajeev Sharma an Uttar Pradesh-based Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer. The paper was found to have no scientific basis.
Now, 2009 Nobel Prize winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, in a talk in Punjab University on January 5, mocked the ISC by calling it a circus and congregation in which very little science was discussed, reported India Today.
Picking on a claim made by a participant at the 102nd science congress held in Mumbai that planes were invented by a sage in the vedic era, the structural biologist and physicist at Cambridge University told TOI that the idea sounded impossible to him.
"The idea Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me. I don't believe it. The point is if that technology was produced in a method so described that anybody could replicate it, then it becomes science,” said the Padma Vibushan awardee.
Referring to the Mangalyaan launch in 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation, which not only had chosen Tuesday as the ‘auspicious’ day for the launch but the chairman went to the extent of paying a visit to the temple, Ramakrishnan said that religious ideologies and science must not be mixed.