Recently Briane Greene was on National Public Radio regarding his new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos which talks about brain churning concepts like parallel universes. He also theorizes that the universe did not have a single begining, instead there were multiple big bangs which created multiple universes. At this point the host said it reminded him of Hindu cosmology.
I am not sure if Hindu cosmology talks about multiple universes and their creation and destruction, or just about the creation and destruction of one universe. Much before Brian Greene, Carl Sagan had noted in Cosmos
“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It 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 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. And there are much longer time scales still.
…A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions”
In his new book Indian Culture And Indias Future Michel Danino writes about the achievements of Āryabhaṭa (476 CE) like computing π, values of sines, diameter of earth, and computation of orbits of planets. Āryabhaṭa was also fascinated with the concept of yugas, in which the universe (in singular) is destroyed and re-created. He wrote “Time is without begining or end”
