Monthly Archives: August 2020

Of all the reasons for wanting to time-travelsaving someone from a fatal mistake, exploring ancient civilizations, gathering evidence about unsolved crimesrecovering lost information isnt the most exciting. But even if a quest to recover the file that didnt auto-save doesn't sound like a Hollywood movie plot, weve all had moments when weve longed to go back in time for exactly that reason.

Theories of time and time-travel have highlighted an apparent stumbling block: time travel requires changing the past, even simply by adding in the time traveller. The problem, according to chaos theory, is that the smallest of changes can cause radical consequences in the future. In this conception of time travel, it wouldnt be advisable to recover your unsaved document since this act would have huge knock-on effects on everything else.

New research in quantum physics from Los Alamos National Laboratory has shown that the so-called butterfly effect can be overcome in the quantum realm in order to unscramble lost information by essentially reversing time.

In a paper published in July, researchers Bin Yan and Nikolai Sinitsyn write that a thought experiment in unscrambling information with time-reversing operations would be expected to lead to the same butterfly effect as the one in the famous Ray Bradburys story A Sound of Thunder In that short story, a time traveler steps on an insect in the deep past and returns to find the modern world completely altered, giving rise to the idea we refer to as the butterfly effect.

In contrast," they wrote, "our result shows that by the end of a similar protocol the local information is essentially restored.

"The primary focus of this work is not 'time travel'physicists do not have an answer yet to tell whether it is possible and how to do time travel in the real world, Yan clarified.

[But] since our protocol involves a 'forward' and a 'backward' evolution of the qubits, achieved by changing the orders of quantum gates in the circuit, it has a nice interpretation in terms of Ray Bradbury's story for the butterfly effect. So, it is an accurate and useful way to understand our results."

What is the butterfly effect?

The world does not behave in a neat, ordered way. If it did, identical events would always produce the same patterns of knock-on effects, and the future would be entirely predictable, or deterministic. Chaos theory claims that the opposite: total randomness is not our situation either. We exist somewhere in the middle, in a world that often appears random but in fact obeys rules and patterns.

Patterns within chaos are hidden because they are highly sensitive to tiny changes, which means similar but not identical situations can produce wildly different outcomes. Another way of putting it is that in a chaotic world, effects can be totally out of proportion to their causes, like the metaphor of a flap of butterfly wings causing a tornado on the other side of the world. On the tornado side of the world, the storm would seem random, because the connection between the butterfly-flap and the tornado is too complex to be apparent. While this butterfly effect is the classic poetic metaphor illustrating chaos theory, chaotic dynamics also play out in real-world contexts, including population growth in the Canadian lynx species and the rotation of Plutos moons.

Another feature of chaos is that, even though the rules are deterministic, the future is not predictable in the long-term. Since chaos is so sensitive to small variations, there are near-infinite ways the rules could play out and we would need to know an impossible amount of detail about the present and past to map out exactly how the world will evolve.

Similarly, you cant reverse-engineer some piece of information about the past simply by knowing the current and even future situations; time-travel doesnt help retrieve past information, because even moving backwards in time, the chaotic system is still in play and will produce unpredictable effects.

Information scrambling

Unscrambling information which has previously been scrambled is not straightforward in a chaotic system. Yan and Sinitsyns key discovery is that it is nonetheless possible in quantum computing to get enough information via time-reversal which will then enable information unscrambling.

According to Yan, the fact that the butterfly effect does not occur in quantum realms is not a surprising result, but demonstrating information unscrambling is both novel and important.

In quantum information theory, scrambling occurs when the information encoded in each quantum particle is split up and redistributed across multiple quantum particles in the same quantum system. The scrambling is not random, since information redistribution relies on quantum entanglement, which means that the states of some quantum particles are dependent on each other. Although the scrambled result is seemingly chaotic, the information can be put back together, at least in principle, using the entangled relationships.

Importantly, information scrambling is not the same as information loss. To continue the earlier analogy: information loss occurs when a document is permanently deleted from your computer. For information scrambling, imagine cutting and pasting tiny bits of one computer file into every other file on your machine. Each file now contains a mess of information snippets. You could reconstruct the original files, if you remembered exactly which bits were cut and pasted, and did the entire process in reverse.

Physicists are interested in information scrambling for two main reasons. On the theoretical side, its been proposed as a way to explain what happens to information sucked into a black hole. On the more applied side, it could be an important mechanism for quantum computers to store and hide information, and could produce fast and efficient quantum simulators, which are used already to perform complex experiments including new drug discovery.

Yan and Sinitsyn fall into the second camp, and construct what they call a practically accessible scenario to test unscrambling by time-travel. This scenario is still hypothetical, but explores the mathematics of the actual quantum processor used by Google to demonstrate quantum supremacy in 2019.

Yan says: Another potential application is to use this effect to protect information. A random evolution on a quantum circuit can make the qubit robust to perturbations. One may further exploit the discovered effect to design protocols in quantum cryptography.

The set-up

In Yan and Sinitsyn's quantum thought experiment, Alice and Bob are the protagonists. Alice is using a simplified version of Googles quantum processor to hide just one part of the information stored on the computer (called the central qubit) by scrambling this qubits state across all the other qubits (called the qubit bath). Bob is cast as the intruder, much like a malicious computer hacker. He wants the important information originally stored on the central qubit, now distributed across entangled quantum particles in the bath.

Unfortunately, Bobs hack, while successful in getting the information he wanted, leaves a trail of destruction.

If her processor has already scrambled the information, Alice is sure that Bob cannot get anything useful, the authors write. However, Bobs measurement changes the state of the central qubit and also destroys all quantum correlations between this qubit and the rest of the system.

Bob's method of information theft has altered the computer state so that Alice can also no longer access the hidden information. In this case, the damage occurs because quantum states contain all possible values they could have, with assigned probabilities of each value, but these possibilities (represented by the wave function) collapse down to just one value when a measurement is taken. Quantum computing relies on unmeasured quantum systems to store even more information in multiple possible states, and Bobs intrusion has totally altered the computer system.

Reversing time

Theoretically, the behaviour of a quantum system moving backwards in time can be demonstrated mathematically using whats called a time-reversed evolution operator, which is exactly what Alice uses to de-scramble the information.

Her time-reversal is not actually time travel the way we understand it from science fiction, it is literally a reversal of times direction; the system evolves backwards following whatever dynamics are in play, rather than Alice herself revisiting an earlier time. If the butterfly effect held in the quantum world, then this backwards evolution would actually increase the damage Bob had caused, and Alice would only be able to retrieve the hidden information if she knew exactly what that damage was and could correct her calculations accordingly.

Luckily for Alice, quantum systems behave totally differently to non-quantum (classical or semiclassical) chaotic systems. What Yan and Sinitsyn found is that she can apply her time-reversal operation and end up at an "earlier" state which will not be identical with the initial system she set up, but it will also not have increased the damage which occurred later. Alice can then reconstruct her initial system using a method of quantum unscrambling called quantum state tomography.

What this means is that a quantum system can effectively heal and even recover information that was scrambled in the past, without the chaos of the butterfly effect.

Classical chaotic evolution magnifies any state damage exponentially quickly, which is known as the butterfly effect, explain Yan and Sinitsyn. The quantum evolution, however, is

linear. This explains why, in our case, the uncontrolled damage to the state is not magnified by the subsequent complex evolution. Moreover, the fact that Bobs measurement does not damage the useful information follows from the property of entanglement correlations in the scrambled state.

Hypothetical though this scenario may be, the result already has a practical use: verifying whether a quantum system has achieved quantum supremacy. Quantum processors can simulate time-reversal in a way that classical computers cannot, which could provide the next important test for the quantum race between Google and IBM.

So, while time travel is still not in the cards, the quantum world continues to mess with our classical conception of how the world evolves in time, and pushes the limits of computing information.

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Scientists Have Shown There's No 'Butterfly Effect' in the Quantum World - VICE

The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and the complex structure we observe today, arose from a ... [+] smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state. But even that initial state had its origins, with cosmic inflation as the leading candidate for where that all came from.

Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, where did all of this come from? For generations, we told one another tales of our own invention, and chose the narrative that sounded best to us. The idea that we could find the answers by examining the Universe itself was foreign until recently, when scientific measurements began to solve the puzzles that had stymied philosophers, theologians, and thinkers alike.

The 20th century brought us General Relativity, quantum physics, and the Big Bang, all accompanied by spectacular observational and experimental successes. These frameworks enabled us to make theoretical predictions that we then went out and tested, and they passed with flying colors while the alternatives fell away. But at least for the Big Bang it left some unexplained problems that required us to go farther. When we did, we found an uncomfortable conclusion that were still reckoning with today: any information about the beginning of the Universe is no longer contained within our observable cosmos. Heres the disconcerting story.

The stars and galaxies we see today didn't always exist, and the farther back we go, the closer to ... [+] an apparent singularity the Universe gets, as we go to hotter, denser, and more uniform states. However, there is a limit to that extrapolation, as going all the way back to a singularity creates puzzles we cannot answer.

In the 1920s, just under a century ago, our conception of the Universe changed forever as two sets of observations came together in perfect harmony. For the past few years, scientists led by Vesto Slipher had begun to measure spectral lines emission and absorption features of a variety of stars and nebulae. Because atoms are the same everywhere in the Universe, the electrons within them make the same transitions: they have the same absorption and emission spectra. But a few of these nebulae, the spirals and ellipticals in particular, had extremely large redshifts that corresponded to high recession speeds: faster than anything else in our galaxy.

Starting in 1923, Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason began measuring individual stars in these nebulae, determining the distances to them. They were far beyond our own Milky Way: millions of light-years away in most instances. When you combined the distance and redshift measurements together, it all pointed to one inescapable conclusion that was also theoretically supported by Einsteins General theory of Relativity: the Universe was expanding. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to recede from us.

The original 1929 observations of the Hubble expansion of the Universe, followed by subsequently ... [+] more detailed, but also uncertain, observations. Hubble's graph clearly shows the redshift-distance relation with superior data to his predecessors and competitors; the modern equivalents go much farther. Note that peculiar velocities always remain present, even at large distances, but that the general trend is what's important.

If the Universe is expanding today, that means that all of the following must be true.

Those are some remarkable and mind-bending facts, as they enable us to extrapolate whats going to happen to the Universe as time marches inexorably forwards. But the same laws of physics that tell us whats going to happen in the future can also tell us what happened in the past, and the Universe itself is no exception. If the Universe is expanding, cooling, and getting less dense today, that means it was smaller, hotter, and denser in the distant past.

While matter (both normal and dark) and radiation become less dense as the Universe expands owing to ... [+] its increasing volume, dark energy, and also the field energy during inflation, is a form of energy inherent to space itself. As new space gets created in the expanding Universe, the dark energy density remains constant.

The big idea of the Big Bang was to extrapolate this back as far as possible: to ever hotter, denser, and more uniform states as we go earlier and earlier. This led to a series of remarkable predictions, including that:

All four of these predictions have been observationally confirmed, with that leftover bath of radiation originally known as the primeval fireball and now called the cosmic microwave background discovered in the mid-1960s often referred to as the smoking gun of the Big Bang.

Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson at the location of the antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, where the cosmic ... [+] microwave background was first identified. Although many sources can produce low-energy radiation backgrounds, the properties of the CMB confirm its cosmic origin.

You might think that this means that we can extrapolate the Big Bang all the way back, arbitrarily far into the past, until all the matter and energy in the Universe is concentrated into a single point. The Universe would reach infinitely high temperatures and densities, creating a physical condition known as a singularity: where the laws of physics as we know them give predictions that no longer make sense and cannot be valid anymore.

At last! After millennia of searching, we had it: an origin for the Universe! The Universe began with a Big Bang some finite time ago, corresponding to the birth of space and time, and that everything weve ever observed has been a product of that aftermath. For the first time, we had a scientific answer that truly indicated not only that the Universe had a beginning, but when that beginning occurred. In the words of Georges Lemaitre, the first person to put together the physics of the expanding Universe, it was a day without yesterday.

A visual history of the expanding Universe includes the hot, dense state known as the Big Bang and ... [+] the growth and formation of structure subsequently. The full suite of data, including the observations of the light elements and the cosmic microwave background, leaves only the Big Bang as a valid explanation for all we see. As the Universe expands, it also cools, enabling ions, neutral atoms, and eventually molecules, gas clouds, stars, and finally galaxies to form.

Only, there were a number of unresolved puzzles that the Big Bang posed, but presented no answers for.

Why did regions that were causally disconnected i.e., had no time to exchange information, even at the speed of light have the same temperatures as one another?

Why were the initial expansion rate of the Universe (which works to expand things) and the total amount of energy in the Universe (which gravitates and fights the expansion) perfectly balanced early on: to more than 50 decimal places?

And why, if we reached these ultra-high temperatures and densities early on, are there no leftover relic remnants from those times in our Universe today?

Throughout the 1970s, the top physicists and astrophysicists in the world worried about these problems, theorizing about possible answers to these puzzles. Then, in late 1979, a young theorist named Alan Guth had a spectacular realization that changed history.

In the top panel, our modern Universe has the same properties (including temperature) everywhere ... [+] because they originated from a region possessing the same properties. In the middle panel, the space that could have had any arbitrary curvature is inflated to the point where we cannot observe any curvature today, solving the flatness problem. And in the bottom panel, pre-existing high-energy relics are inflated away, providing a solution to the high-energy relic problem. This is how inflation solves the three great puzzles that the Big Bang cannot account for on its own.

The new theory was known as cosmic inflation, and postulated that perhaps the idea of the Big Bang was only a good extrapolation back to a certain point in time, where it was preceded (and set up) by this inflationary state. Instead of reaching arbitrary high temperatures, densities, and energies, inflation states that:

until inflation ends. When it ends, the energy that was inherent to space itself the energy thats the same everywhere, except for the quantum fluctuations imprinted atop it gets converted into matter and energy, resulting in a hot Big Bang.

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation get stretched across the Universe, and when ... [+] inflation ends, they become density fluctuations. This leads, over time, to the large-scale structure in the Universe today, as well as the fluctuations in temperature observed in the CMB. New predictions like these are essential for demonstrating the validity of a proposed fine-tuning mechanism.

Theoretically, this was a brilliant leap, because it offered a plausible physical explanation for the observed properties the Big Bang alone could not account for. Causally disconnected regions have the same temperature because they all arose from the same inflationary patch of space. The expansion rate and the energy density were perfectly balanced because inflation gave that same expansion rate and energy density to the Universe prior to the Big Bang. And there were no left over, high-energy remnants because the Universe only reached a finite temperature after inflation ended.

In fact, inflation also made a series of novel predictions that differed from that of the non-inflationary Big Bang, meaning we could go out and test this idea. As of today, in 2020, weve collected data that puts four of those predictions to the test:

The large, medium and small-scale fluctuations from the inflationary period of the early Universe ... [+] determine the hot and cold (underdense and overdense) spots in the Big Bang's leftover glow. These fluctuations, which get stretched across the Universe in inflation, should be of a slightly different magnitude on small scales versus large ones.

With data from satellites like COBE, WMAP, and Planck, weve tested all four, and only inflation (and not the non-inflationary hot Big Bang) yields predictions that are in line with what weve observed. But this means that the Big Bang wasnt the very beginning of everything; it was only the beginning of the Universe as were familiar with it. Prior to the hot Big Bang, there was a state known as cosmic inflation, that eventually ended and gave rise to the hot Big Bang, and we can observe the imprints of cosmic inflation on the Universe today.

But only for the last tiny, minuscule fraction of a second of inflation. Only, perhaps, for the final ~10-33 seconds of it (or so) can we observe the imprints that inflation left on our Universe. Its possible that inflation lasted for only that duration, or for far longer. Its possible that the inflationary state was eternal, or that it was transient, arising from something else. Its possible that the Universe did begin with a singularity, or arose as part of a cycle, or has always existed. But that information doesnt exist in our Universe. Inflation by its very nature erases whatever existed in the pre-inflationary Universe.

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation do indeed get stretched across the Universe, ... [+] but they also cause fluctuations in the total energy density. These field fluctuations cause density imperfections in the early Universe, which then lead to the temperature fluctuations we experience in the cosmic microwave background. The fluctuations, according to inflation, must be adiabatic in nature.

In many ways, inflation is like pressing the cosmic reset button. Whatever existed prior to the inflationary state, if anything, gets expanded away so rapidly and thoroughly that all were left with is empty, uniform space with the quantum fluctuations that inflation creates superimposed atop it. When inflation ends, only a tiny volume of that space somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and a city block will become our observable Universe. Everything else, including any of the information that would enable us to reconstruct what happened earlier in our Universes past, now lies forever beyond our reach.

Its one of the most remarkable achievements of science of all: that we can go back billions of years in time and understand when and how our Universe, as we know it, came to be this way. But like many adventures, revealing those answers has only raised more questions. The puzzles that have arisen this time, however, may truly never be solved. If that information is no longer present in our Universe, it will take a revolution to solve the greatest puzzle of all: where did all this come from?

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How Physics Erases The Beginning Of The Universe - Forbes

In A Sound of Thunder, the short story by Ray Bradbury, the main character travels back in time to hunt dinosaurs. He crushes a butterfly underfoot in the prehistoric jungle, and when he returns to the present, the world he knows is changed: the feel of the air, a sign in an office, the election of a U.S. president. The butterfly was a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time.

This butterfly effect that Bradbury illustrated where a small change in the past can result in enormous future effects is not reserved for fiction. As the famed mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered by accident, natural systems do exist in which tiny shifts in initial conditions can lead to highly variable outcomes. These systems, including weather and even how fluids mix are known as chaotic. Chaotic systems are normally understood within the realm of classical physics, which is the method we use to predict how objects will move to a certain degree of accuracy (think motion, force or momentum from your high school science class.)

But a new study shows that the effect doesnt work in a quantum realm. Two researchers at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, created a simulation where a qubit, a quantum bit, moved backwards and forwards in time on a quantum computer. Despite being damaged, the qubit held on to its original information instead of becoming unrecognizable like the time travelers world after he killed the butterfly. In the study, the process used to simulate time travel forwards and backwards is known as evolution.

From the point of view of classical physics, it's very unexpected because classical physics predicts that complex evolution has a butterfly effect, so that small changes deep in the past lead to huge changes in our world, says Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist and one of the researchers who conducted the study.

The finding furthers our understanding of quantum systems, and also has potential applications in securing information systems and even determining the quantum-ness of a quantum processor.

The rules of the quantum realm, which explain how subatomic particles move, can be truly mind-boggling because they defy traditional logic. But briefly: Particles as small as electrons and protons don't just exist in one point in space, they can occupy many at a time. The mathematical framework of quantum mechanics tries to explain the motion of these particles.

The laws of quantum mechanics can also be applied to quantum computers. These are very different from computers we use today, and can solve certain problems exponentially faster than normal computers can because they adhere to these completely different laws of physics. A standard computer uses bits with a value of either 0 or 1. A quantum computer uses qubits, which can attain a kind of combined state of 0 or 1, a unique characteristic of quantum systems for example, an electron called superposition.

In a quantum system, small changes to qubits even looking at or measuring them can have immense effects. So in the new study, the researchers wanted to see what would happen when they simulated sending a qubit back in time while also damaging it. Researchers constructing quantum experiments often use the stand-ins Alice and Bob to illustrate their theoretical process. In this case, they let Alice bring her qubit back in time, scrambling the information as part of what they call reverse evolution. Once in the past, Bob, an intruder, measures Alices qubit, changing it. Alice brings her qubit forward in time.

If the butterfly effect had held, the original information in Alices qubit would have been exponentially changed. But instead, the evolution forward in time allowed Alice to recover the original information, even though Bobs intrusion had destroyed all the connections between her qubit and others that travelled with hers.

So normally, many people believe that if you go back in time, and scramble the information, that information is lost forever, says Jordan Kyriakidis, an expert in quantum computing and former physicist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. What they have shown in this paper is that for quantum systems, that under certain circumstances, if you go back in time, you can recover the original information even though someone tried to scramble it on you.

So does this mean that the butterfly effect doesnt exist at all? No. Sinitsyn and his coauthor, Bin Yan, showed it doesnt exist within the quantum realm, specifically.

But this does have implications for real-world problems. One is information encryption. Encryption has two important principles: It should be hidden so well that no one can get to it, but who it was intended for should to be able to reliably decipher it. For example, explains Kyriakidis, if a hacker attempts to crack a code that hides information in todays world, the hacker might not be able to get to it, but they could damage it irreparably, preventing anyone from reading the original message. This study may point to a way to avoid this by protecting information, even after its damaged, so the intended recipient can interpret it.

And because this effect (or non-effect) is so particular to quantum systems, it could theoretically be used to test the integrity of a quantum computer. If one were to replicate Yan and Sinitsyns protocol in a quantum computer, according to the study, it would confirm that the system was truly operating by quantum principles. Because quantum computers are highly prone to errors, a tool to easily test how well they work has huge value. A reliable quantum computer can solve incredibly complex problems, which have applications from chemistry and medicine to traffic direction and financial strategy.

Quantum computing is only in its birth but if Yan and Sinitsyns quantum time machine can exist in a realm usually saved for subatomic particles, well, the possibilities could be endless.

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Does the Butterfly Effect Exist? Maybe, But Not in the Quantum Realm - Discover Magazine

The academic journeys of the Austrian-Irish quantum physicist, Erwin Schrodinger and the Hungarian-American geophysicist Joseph Kaplan might seem strikingly relevant to the emphasis put upon multidisciplinary education, inclusive of the Indian knowledge systems, in the National Educational Policy 2020. Yes, these are not Indian examples; there are many Indian examples. But I have consciously chosen these two scientists to support my argument, because such has been colonial atmosphere of higher education in the country that unless one mentions renowned names from the West such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Einstein, Thoreau, and the like, who were either influenced by the Indian thought or found it worthy of reflection, there is no way that an Indian student can be convinced that there lies any worth in a textual-intellectual tradition that has survived for thousands of years.

Shrodinger won the Nobel prize for his work in quantum physics in 1933. His work was yet another blow to Macaulays infamous statement in Minute on Education(1835) that the whole literature of India and the Arab world was inferior to a single shelf of European books. The Nobel Prize winner for what came to be known as the Schrodinger equation was deeply influenced by Indian thought systems. Dick Teresi, the acclaimed author of The Three-Pound Universe (1986) and Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman (1990) writes in an article titled The Long Range of Quantum Physics, published in The New York Times:

Schrodinger never achieved his greatest dream, to reinstate classical physics with its almost Vedantic continuity over the lumpiness of quantum mechanics. Perhaps as a revenge against his quantum enemies, he did leave behind a paradox that torments scientists to this day.

The Hungarian-American physicist, on the other hand, commemorated again by The New York Times for his leadership in international work in Geophysics, was drawn towards the Samkhya philosophical system. He found in its epistemology a reflection of the modern physicists enquiry into the dynamism of matter and energy. In his own words,

By this I mean that if a modern physicist were to discuss the gunas, he would, in the light of knowledge and experience, use the same argument [as the Samkhyas].

As in other colonized nations, colonialism in India produced a mental attitude of subordination to the West and its intellectual history. However, post-Independence, the political exigencies of those who determined what got included into the curriculum and shaped the pedagogies of intermediate and higher education shoved the Indian intellectual texts away to either libraries where dust gathered on the book covers or limited them to the Sanskrit or Tamil departments, thereby preventing their access to the students of other disciplines. It would not surprise anyone that our students would have never even heard of names such as Panini, Patanjali, Pingala, Aryabhatta, Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, and Abhinavagupta. In 2019, Ayurveda made headlines for all wrong reasons. A section of the academic community teaching in elite Indian colleges and universities mocked the fact that ancient Indians knew and performed surgery. What underlay such strong belief that Indians of the past had nothing to do with scientific knowledge? What else than a systematic and ideological construction of a mentally and intellectually subordinate consciousness that looks upon its culture and people as mere empirical data. The Columbia University Medical Irving Medical Centre on a webpage titled History of Medicine: Ancient Indian Nose Jobs and the Origins of Plastic Surgery, states:

Think plastic surgery is a modern luxury During 6th century BCE, an Indian physician named Sushruta- widely regarded in India as the father of surgery- wrote one of the worlds earliest works on medicine and surgery. The Sushruta Samhita documented the etiology of more than 1100 diseases.

Ironically, the Indians from the elite institutions who mock the existence of surgery in ancient India would not bother to even open a single page of the Sushruta Samhita.

I do not suggest that we remain stuck in the past. Past can be, and is, used for regressive politics as well. And modern science and the modern Intellectual traditions of the West are undeniably important. But a young mind rooted in its traditions of knowledge, when it comes into contact with the modern thought would have the ability to contribute originally to the knowledge it receives, to modify and create new knowledge.

The National Education Policy (NEP) announced on 29 July 2020 has grasped the foundational principle of the Indian knowledge tradition- its multidisciplinary nature. Most students and scholars understand interdisciplinarity as an outcome of a modern Western phenomenon with conceptual roots in the Greek thought. They would not know that knowledge (vidya) was essentially interdisciplinary in India.

Vidya in Sanskrit denotes knowledge pertaining to arts, sciences, and philosophy. Sciences include all shastras (scientific treatises) such as astronomy and mathematics, logic, medicine, mining, metaphysics, phonetics, literature as well as economics, agriculture, trade, commerce, law, polity, etc. There are epistemological differences between a particular discipline and another. However, the discourses overlap disciplinary domains. Ideas and facts from disciplines flow into the texts of other disciplines. Artistic and scientific texts are differentiated only by their modes of expression.

For example, Rajashekhara (8th century CE), a poet, in his Kavyamimasa, lays down that an aspiring poet and critic must be well-versed in sixty-four disciplines of knowledge that include painting, pottery, weaving, carpentry, tailoring, making cots of cane, locating mines, etc. The multidisciplinary method of knowledge creation and dissemination enabled the mind and its cognitive and creative faculty to think diversely and converge multiple perspectives onto a subject of study. It is not surprising, therefore, that this knowledge tradition produced thinkers such as Panini (6th-5th century BCE), whose text on Sanskrit grammar has become a reference point for computational studies and Pingala (3rd-2nd century BCE) who was a mathematician, but wrote a seminal work on prosody called Chhandahshashtra.

The multidisciplinary method of learning in the higher education, as envisaged by the NEP, with an open-minded reception of the Indian knowledge traditions, will decolonize the young Indian mind, while making it equally aware of the knowledge created in other intellectual centres of the world, including other Asian civilizational giants.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Dismantling disciplinary boundaries and decolonizing young India: Decoding the National Educational Policy (20 - The Times of India Blog