________________
JAIN JOURNAL: Vol-XXXIV, No. 2 October 1999 revealed a remarkable flight of thought in his celebrated work, The Time Machine'. Here he formulated the essence of space-time continuum just before Einstein and Minkowskii thought over it.
112
We note that H.G. Wells here asked in "Time Machine", "Can an instantaneous cube exist" and further elucidated it as "Can a cube whose any side does not last for any time at all exist"?
He, i.e. Wells, answered in the negative and developed a concept of a 4-dimensional world in which the material objects exist. He talked of 3-dimensional sections in the 4-dimensional world. This is very similar to that of Minkowskii and Einstein. The Wellsian idea may be compared with Jacobi's comments on Sutra No. 6.
In spite of such important theoretical realization, the Indian philosophers could not proceed very far because of their dependence on religious ideas. Actually, there was hardly a philosopher completely free from religious tradition. The other reason for the decline of Indian science was the large gap between theory and experiments or practical application. It is relevant to mention here that in Greece, philosophers like Anaxogoras, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius etc. were purely materialistic. According to the words of Farrington:
"With the Science of Alexandria and of Rome we are in very truth on the threshold of the sixteenth century, it took up where the Greeks left off."
Unfortunately, Indian Science could not repeat or continue her earlier glory.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
