Science and Technology minister Harsh Vardhan has claimed that renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who passed away this week, had once said the Vedas might have a theory that is superior to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Speaking at the 105th edition of the Indian Science Congress at Imphal, the minister said, “We recently lost a renowned scientist, cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He emphatically said on record that our Vedas might have a theory superior to that of Einstein’s E=mc2.”
Mr Vardhan made the comments while sharing the stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
When pressed for the source to buttress his claims, he said, ” You find the source. He had on record said that there is a possibility that Vedas have a better formula than the one given by Einstein. You also work a bit on this (to find this source).”
Indian Express
However, a report in Hindustan Times suggested that our science minister might have become a victim of fake news.
The only online reference of Hawking commenting on Vedic science being superior to Einstein is available on the website of the Hyderabad-based Institute of Science Research on Vedas (I-SERVE), HT reported.
The paper said, Sakamuri Sivaram Babu, a former senior official at I-SERVE, claimed that Hawking commented on one of his papers related to the theory of creation propounded in the Vedas.
The daily also claimed that the comments were not on the official Stephen Hawking Facebook page, but on a fake Stephen Hawking Facebook page.
Meanwhile, Vardhan has also defended his statement on Twitter.
With his latest remarks, Vardhan joins the long list of BJP minister who often go overboard to connect modern inventions and discoveries with ancient Indian scriptures.
In January, Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Satyapal Singh said that ‘mantras coded the laws of motion much before they were discovered by English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Sir Issac Newton’. He had earlier said termed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as ‘scientifically wrong.’
