Post by Amritha Varshini on Jan 8, 2015 6:19:24 GMT 5.5
Theory of creation of the universe:
A 9th century Hindu scripture, The Mahapurana by Jinasena claims the something as modern as the following:
Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before creation?... How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on principles.
Theories of the creation of universe are present in almost every culture. Mostly they represent some story portraying creation from mating of Gods or humans, or from some divine egg, essentially all of them reflecting the human endeavour to provide explanations to a grave scientific question using common human experience.
Hinduism is the only religion that propounds the idea of life-cycles of the universe. It suggests that the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. Hinduism, according to Sagan, "... is the only religion in which the time scales correspond... to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of the Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang" [See 5]. Long before Aryabhata (6th century) came up with this awesome achievement, apparently there was a mythological angle to this as well -- it becomes clear when one looks at the following translation of Bhagavad Gita (part VIII, lines 16 and 17), "All the planets of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is worth a thousand of the ages [yuga] known to humankind; as is each night." Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga must be repeated a thousand times to make a "day ot Brahma", a unit of time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets 8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was later theorized (possibly independently) by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by contraction... a cosmos without end. This, according to modern physicists is not an impossibility.
And here is how -- a few billion years ago, something known as the Big Bang happened and it is believed that the universe, as we "know" it, came into existence; one that is continually expanding after the Big Bang. That the galaxies are receding from us can be proved by showing Dopler shifts of far off galaxies. Common belief is that it happened from a mathematical point with no dimension at all. All the matter in our universe was concentrated in that miniscule volume. Although we know that we are living in an expanding universe, physicists are not sure whether it will always be expanding. This is because it is not known whether there is enough matter in the universe such that there is enough gravitational cohesion in it that the expansion will gradually slow down, stop and reverse itself resulting into a contracting universe. If we live in such an oscillating universe, then the Big Bang is not the beginning or creation of the universe, but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the universe in the very way suggested by Hindu philosophers thousands of years ago!
A brand new theory -- that of a "CYCLIC MODEL", developed by Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University's Neil Turok, made its highest-profile appearance yet in April 2002, on Science Express, the Web site for the journal Science. But past incarnations of the idea have been hotly debated within the cosmological community from 2001. The PDF preprint of the entire paper can be downloaded from here (See link below).
feynman.princeton.edu/~steinh/dm6.pdf