Amit's Blog

A tale of zero, translators, and the geopolitics of historical memory The conventional narrative of "Arab science" bridging India and Europe is a historical shorthand that has become a convenient fiction. What actually transpired was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious intellectual marathon spanning centuries. Persian bureaucrats funded the enterprise, Syrian Christian monks did the heavy lifting of translation, Indian mathematicians supplied the conceptual toolkit—and the Arabian Peninsula, while culturally significant, was notably peripheral to the scientific engine room. This article traces the journey of knowledge from India to Europe, exposing the erasures embedded in the label "Arab science" and revealing how modern geopolitics, nationalist agendas, and academic laziness have conspired to simplify a gloriously complex story into a single, misleading adjective. The zero, it turns out, carries more philosophical baggage than any number ever should. The Ind...

The Naked-Eye Cosmos: How Ancient Astronomers Mapped the Heavens Without a Telescope   Between 1500 BCE and 800 CE, ancient civilizations achieved a breathtakingly precise understanding of astronomy without any optical aids. This intellectual revolution was driven by profound necessity: agriculture, religion, and statecraft. The Babylonians, masters of data, developed predictive arithmetic models and a fixed zodiac from centuries of astrological records. The Greeks applied geometry to this data, crafting physical models of the cosmos, with Ptolemy’s Almagest as the pinnacle. Indian astronomers, like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, fused these ideas with revolutionary mathematics, perfecting the sine function, calculating with zero, and discovering the ayanamsa (precession of the equinoxes) to explain "zodiac slip." Chinese court astronomers maintained meticulous omen records, while Persian scholars became vital translators. Sponsored by temples and royal courts, ...