New Delhi: On the first day of the 105th Indian Science Congress, Union minister for science and technology Harsh Vardhan, said the physicist Stephen Hawking had once remarked that the Vedas might have a theory superior to Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2.
The minster was addressing the inaugural session of the congress at Manipur University in Imphal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tribute to Hawking, who died on Wednesday, in his inaugural speech, referring to him as one of the brightest stars of cosmology and a friend of India. Hawking had visited the country twice.
“The common man knows Hawking’s name, not because of his work on black holes, but because of his unusually high commitment and spirit against all odds. He will be remembered as one of the world’s greatest motivators of all time,” Modi said in his speech.
Vardhan said that each and every custom and ritual of Hinduism is steeped in science. “Every modern achievement is a continuation of our ancient scientific achievement. Hawking had also said that our Vedas might have a theory superior to Einstein’s law E = mc2,” he later tweeted.
When reporters asked for the source of his information, Vardhan said they could find it themselves.
Even though Hawking did contradict Einstein’s theories on a few occasions, there is no evidence to corroborate if he ever stated that the “Vedas might have a theory superior to Einstein’s law”.
Several physicists Mint spoke to said they could not recall Hawking ever making such a statement.
“I doubt it. I have never heard of any such statement made by Hawking before,” said Rohini Godbole, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which forms the basis of modern physics, states that energy and mass are interchangeable and space and time are linked for objects that are moving at a consistent speed in a straight line.
Vardhan’s statement comes soon after minister of state for human resource development Satya Pal Singh claimed to debunk Darwin’s theory of evolution with a remark that “our ancestors had nowhere mentioned that they had seen an ape turning into man”.
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