Reviving Bharatiya Vigyan - 1: Getting the hermeneutics right
सुखम समग्रम विज्ञाने विमलेच प्रतिष्ठितं Sukham samagram vijnane vimalecha pratishtitham "All happiness is rooted in good science," says the Charaka Samhita -- the definitive treatise on Ayurveda, dating back to 8th century BCE. This belies the widely believed notion that science and "scientific temper" came to India from the West. Every form of scientific practice, rests upon an underlying hermeneutics -- or a way of thinking. The hermeneutics of current day scientific inquiry is greatly influenced by the industrial revolution , which in turn was fuelled by colonial expansion of European powers. I've called this form of inquiry as "machine hermeneutics" and also sometimes called the "clockwork model," where the universe is considered to be a giant, impersonal automaton, driven solely by causality, and indifferent to our existence. Hermeneutics affect how we interpret our observations and what models we build. As the physicist Werner He