Hinduism's cosmology was prodigious in scope and depth, but India did not stop there. She went on to advance what was probably the most daring hypothesis man has ever conceived. We are ourselves are the infinite, the very infinite from which the Universe proceeds. Everything in Hinduism works to drive the point home.

To seek the ultimate origin or predisposition of the Indian conviction in the profoundly Hindu world view of endless cyclical change, kalpa and mahakalpas succeeding one another in self-sufficient and unwearying round. For Hindus as well as Taoists, the universe itself was a perpetual motion machine.

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.

No nation on earth can vie with the Hindus in respect of the antiquity oftheir civilization and the antiquity of their religion." ... "In a metaphysical point of view we fmd among the Hindus all the fundamental ideas of those vast systems which, regarded merely as the offspring offantasy, nevertheless inspire admiration on account of the boldness of flight and of the faculty of human mind to elevate itself to such remote ethereal regions. We find among them all the principles of Pantheism, Spinozism and Hegelianism, of God as being one with the universe; spiritual life of mankind; and of the return of the emanative sparks after death to their divine origin; of the uninterrupted alternation between life and death, which is nothing else but a transition between different modes of existence. All this we find among the philosophies of the Hindus exhibited as clearly as by our modem philosophers more than three thousand years since.

That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modem] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs.”

I have already had occasion to touch on the Indian metaphysicks of natural bodies according to the most celebrated of the Asiatick schools, from which the Pythagoreans are supposed to have borrowed many of their opinions; and as we learn from Cicero, that the old sages of Europe had an idea of centripetal force and a principle of universal gravitation... so I can venture to affirm, without meaning to pluck a leaf from the neverfading laurels of our immortal Newton, that the whole of his theology and part of his philosophy may be found in the Védas and even in the works of the Sufis: that most subtil spirit, which he suspected to pervade natural bodies, and, lying concealed in them, to cause attraction and repulsion, the emission, reflection, and refraction of light, electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion, is described by the Hindus as a fifth element endued with those very powers; and the Védas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly ascribe to the Sun, thence called Aditya, or the Attractor; a name designed by the mythologists to mean the child of the Goddess ; but the most wonderful passage on the theory of attraction occurs in the charming allegorical poem of Shi'ri'n and Ferha'd, or the Divine Spirit and a human Soul disinterestedly pious; a work which from the first verse to the last, is a blaze of religious and poetical fire. The whole passage appears to me so curious that I make no apology for giving you a faithful translation of it: "There is a strong propensity, which dances through every atom, and attracts the minutest particle to some peculiar object; search this universe from its base to its summit, from fire to air, from water to earth, from all below the Moon to all above the celestial spheres, and thou wilt not find a corpuscle destitute of that natural attractibility; the very point of the first thread, in this apparently tangled skein, is no other than such a principle of attraction, and all principles beside are void of a real basis; from such a propensity arises every motion perceived in heavenly or in terrestrial bodies; it is a disposition to be attracted, which taught hard steel to rush from its place and rivet itself on the magnet; it is the same disposition, which impels the light straw to attach itself firmly on amber; it is this quality which gives every substance in nature a tendency toward another, and an inclination forcibly directed to a determinate point." These notions are vague, indeed, and unsatisfactory; but permit me to ask, whether the last paragraph of Newton's incomparable work goes much farther, and whether any subsequent experiments have thrown light on a subject so abstruse and obscure: that the sublime astronomy and exquisitely beautiful geometry, with which that work is illumined, should in any degree be approached by the Mathematicians of Asia... but we must suspend our opinion of Indian astronomical knowledge, till the Súrya siddhánta shall appear in our own language, and even then... our greedy and capacious ears will by no means be satisfied; for in order to complete an historical account of genuine Hindu astronomy, we require... translations of at least three other Sanscrit books; of the treatise by Parasara, for the first age of Indian science, of that by Vara'ha [Mihira] with the copious comment of his very learned son [Prithuyasas], for the middle age, and of those written by Bhascara for times comparatively modern...

The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived Hindus their knowledge.

It is ironic that our great western civilization, which has opened to the minds of all mankind the infinite wonders of a universe of untold billions of galaxies should be saddled with the tightest little cosmological image known to mankind? The Hindus with their grandiose Kalpas and their ideas of the divine power which is beyond all human category (male or female). Not so alien to the imagery of modern science that it could not have been put to acceptable use.

The Rigveda stated that the earth was a ...globe suspended freely in space. The Vedic texts disclosed that the Sun held the earth and heavenly bodies in its orbit. The Shatapatha Brahmana, a treatise of untold antiquity, recognized and explained the fact that the earth was spherical.. Aryabhata explained the daily rising and setting of planets and stars in terms of the earth’s constant revolutionary motion. The Surya Siddhantha said that the earth, owing to its gravitational force draw all things to itself. In physics, the thinker Kanada, explained light and heat as different aspects of the same element, thus anticipating Clarke Maxwell's Electro-magnetic Theory, which unified different forms of radiant energy. Sankaracharya, in his Advaita thought expanded the concept of unity of matter and energy. Vacaspati recognized light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances, anticipating Newton’s Corpuscular Theory of Light and the later discovery of the Photon. In Botany, Sankara Mishra and Kanada have discussed the circulation of sap in the Plant and the Santiparva of Mahabharata has clearly stated that the plants develop on the strength of nutrients made through interaction of sunlight and materials obtained from the air and ground. Bhaskarcharya's concept of Differential Calculus preceded Newton by many centuries. His study of time identified Truti: The 3400th part of a second as the unit of time.

Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow—we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely—through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site. Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of "world ages" of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.

Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow — we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely — through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.
Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of 'world ages' of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.

Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book.

While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe - India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that modem astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.

The Hindu mind has a vision of eternity and infinity. It is aware of the vast cycles of creation and destruction that govern the many universes and innumerable creatures within them.