Literature and Science

"Sidereal motion (1complete revolution around the earth) of the moon takes 27.3217 days. Thus along the path of the moon it traverses 27 nakshatras or group of stars. Here Sidharth brings in the myth that Daksha had 28 daughters and the Moon spends about one day in each nakshatra and takes a little over 27 days to complete its synodic cycle. Hence one nakshatra had to go and Daksha married off one of his daughters to Siva.

A further significance of the number 27 can be seen in a circle drawn inside a square touching its sides. The circle is divided into twelve equal parts (12 x 30 = 360). They are named after the common zodiac signs for convenience. Then the circle is divided into 27 equal parts of 13 degrees 20 minutes (13o 20” x 27 = 3600) accommodating 27 stars per asterism. 5

Interestingly this combination of 13 and 20 is found in the Mayan calendar, referred to as the Tzolkin.! The Mayans also had a 365 day calendar, known as the Haab which intermeshed with the Tzolkin.

The most striking feature appears to be identification of the Precession of the Equinoxes, which simply put, alters the position of the star in the sky due to the spinning motion of the Earth, i.e. the celestial north Pole does not point towards the same star after a given period of time due to the wobble of the earth as it spins on its axis. The precession of the equinox appears to be the underlying theme in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s masterpiece, Hamlet’s mill, as being the encoded message in myths amongst many cultures.6 Due to precession, the vernal equinox moves along the ecliptic by 1° in approximately 72 years. Coincidentally, the number of temples built around Angkor Wat is 72! The Chatur-yuga, 4,320,000 years is related to the precessional cycle, 25,867 years corresponding to a precession of 50.1 arc-seconds per year. This is amazingly close to the normally accepted value of 50.2 arc-seconds for the precessional constant."

from Subra Narayan



From Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

String theories ,however, have a bigger problem: they seem to be consistent only if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions, instead of the usual four! Of course extra space-time dimensions are a commonplace of science fiction; indeed, they are almost a necessity, since otherwise the fact that relativity implies that one cannot travel faster than light means that it would take far too long to travel between stars and galaxies. The science fiction idea is that maybe one can take a shortcut through a higher dimension. One can picture this in the following way.

Imagine that the space we live in has only two dimensions and is curved like the surface of an anchor ring or torus. If you were on one side of the inside edge of the ring and you wanted to get to a point on the other side, you would have to go round the inner edge of the ring. However, if you were able to travel in the third dimension, you could cut straight across.

Poetry and Physics