Is the universe heliocentric or geocentric?

Anwser Podcast

Transcript

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will confirm this finding. Thank you. So is the universe geocentric or is it heliocentric? Science says it is heliocentric.
Actually first of all if you look at the cosmology that is talked about in the Bhagavatam, it’s talked from a very different perspective. So you know the frame of reference determines the observation. I have a whole PowerPoint presentation on this.
I have a full class on this, Reconciling Modern Cosmology and Scientific Cosmology. I’ll just give 2-3 points over here right now. See, if you take chalk and you take coal, you grind both of them into powder.
Now what will you have? You mix the two powders. You had black powder, white powder, you mix it together. You will get a grey powder.
But now if you look at the grey powder under a microscope, you will not see any grey powder. You will see white granules, you will see black granules. Now what is it actually? Is it a grey powder or is it white granules and black granules? Yeah, but you don’t see it that way.
So what we see depends on our scale of observation. It depends on the way we are perceiving things. So the basic point is that modern science perceives cosmology in a particular way.
Vedic science, Vedic cosmology sees it in a very different way. And because of that, so the two of us could have an argument. If I did not have the microscope through which you are looking, I would say this is grey powder.
You say, no, it’s white granules and black granules. Actually at one level we can say there is no similarity but a complete difference. White granules and black granules and grey powder, they are two very different things.
But they are the same thing perceived at different scales of observation. So similarly what the Bhagavatam talks about is at a very different scale of observation. And first of all, so when we try to bring the two together over here, we cannot simplistically say that it is like this or it is like that.
So if you study science deeply, in science itself there is a big debate whether science tells us about reality or whether science gives us a model of reality. You know what I mean by model? Model is like a representation, a depiction, a map. So science, let me complete this, that originally when Newton proposed the theory of gravity and from that science went forward.
Dalton proposed the atomic structure of matter. Then at that time, till the start of the 20th century, many scientists felt that actually science is telling us about reality. But in the 20th century, classical physics, Newtonian physics, that was found not working for two fields.
One is the motion of subatomic particles for which quantum physics was developed and for the motion of celestial objects, for that relativity physics was developed. Now relativity physics and quantum physics are violently contradictory. Relativity requires the existence of particles.
Quantum physics assumes that there are simply waves. So there is just no way these two can be reconciled. So how do you reconcile it? It is not reconcilable.
Scientists say that quantum physics offers us one model of reality, relativity offers another model of reality. And in different contexts, different models work. So what reality is, science doesn’t tell us that.
Einstein said that the more mathematical a theory is, the further it is away from reality. The closer a theory is to reality, the further it will be from mathematics. Because the language of reality is not the language of mathematics alone.
For example, a boy says to a girl, I love you. And she asks, okay, now tell me how much you love me. Emotions are not mathematically measurable.
There is so much in this world that is not mathematically measurable. So the point I am making is that science offers us models of reality. And within science itself there are two models which are not reconcilable.
And scripture offers us a vision of reality from a different perspective. Sometimes there are some devotees who argue that science is wrong and scripture is right. Actually that is not the point over there.
The point is not that one is wrong and the other is right. The point is that these are two different models of reality. And this is perceived from a particular way, this is perceived from another way.
So and within, if we see within the Vedic tradition itself, there are different ways of looking at the universe. So there is, the Bhagavatam has a particular cosmology and there are astrological texts called Jyotish Shastras. They have another cosmology.
And so basically, just as in science there are different models of looking at the world, Bhagavatam is also offering different models of looking at the world. So we don’t have to position science and scripture as competitors. Science is offering us knowledge in a particular way, scripture is offering us knowledge in another way.
And if somebody is putting them in competition or contradiction, then we have to understand that that is one way of looking at it. But that is not the only way of looking at it. Science talks about the outer world and about how to manage things in the outer world.
Scripture talks primarily about the inner world and how we can grow internally, how we can get higher spiritual knowledge and how we can develop love for Krishna. So in my seminars, I say that science can make things better. Spirituality can make people better.
So science can make things better. But it is spirituality which we need for making people better. So when you understand that they have their domains, then the contradiction gets substantially reduced.
Does that answer your question?