tech2 News Staff

It appears that quacks and pseudoscientists are not just walking amongst, but taking the stage alongside the brightest minds at the 106th Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar Friday.

G Nageshwar Rao, the vice chancellor of Andhra University, took the stage to deliver a talk on day two at the Congress, where he claimed that India was well aware of stem cells, test tube fertilisation and guided missiles thousands of years ago, citing tales from Mahabharata and Ramayana, according to a PTI report.

“We had hundreds of Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell research and test tube baby technology,” Rao claimed. “It happened a few thousand years ago. This was science in this country...Mahabharat says, 100 eggs were fertilised and put into 100 earthen pots. Are they not test tube babies? Stem cell research in this country was present thousands of years ago.”

What’s more, Rao went on to claim that Lord Ram made use of "astras" and "shastras" – weapons which return after having struck their intended targets. This, according to him, was proof that guided missiles were part of India’s arsenal thousands of years ago.

Ravana from the epic tale Ramayana had 24 types of aircrafts in different shapes, sizes, each boasting capacities unlike the other and taking off and landing at any of Lanka’s many airports.

Another supposed “scientist” Kanan Jegathala Krishnan, took the stage on day 2 of the Science Congress on Friday, and delivered a talk on Einstein’s theories. Not only did he stray wildly off-topic, but he also dragged established theories by legendary scientists like Newton to the ground and managed to spend a great deal of time hyping his own achievements in the process, the Print reported.

“Space is heavier than the sun and every other planet and hence compresses all the planets. Equal pressure is applied to them, which is why they are moving,” Krishnan said.

“The quality of space is self-compressive, which is something that Newton and Einstein could not understand. Einstein did not guide the world in the correct way.”

Not only was Newton a bit of a dimwit when it came to an understanding of Physics, Einstein fared no better, and misled the world with his legendary theory of relativity, according to Krishnan.

It wasn’t gravity, but the ability of space to ‘self-compress’ that objects moved at a certain speed, in his view.

No breed of legend was spared from Krishnan’s firing.

The Minister for Science and Technology Dr Harsh Vardhan will be a bigger scientist in the future than Dr A P J Abdul Kalam ever was, in his view. And if that wasn’t nearly enough, Krishnan went on to say that once his theories about gravity were accepted, what the world has come to know as "gravitational waves" will be known as "Narendra Modi waves", and gravitational lensing, the "Harsh Vardhan effect".

India, 2019. A complete nutcase Sanghi quack is invited to give a keynote speech at our apex STEM event, the Indian Science Congress. As a physics major, I laughed, then I cried https://t.co/XZSUHxRIDa — Prasanto K Roy (@prasanto) January 5, 2019

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