The kilogram lives in France. Cast in platinum and iridium over 120 years ago, it is a shiny cylinder named the International Prototype Kilogram, which stays hermetically sealed inside a triple-locked underground vault outside Paris. Nicknamed Le Grand K, it is the last word, or more precisely last thing, in measuring mass.
But what if it falls? Or is stolen? Poof! would go the ultimate benchmark for all measurements of weight and mass in every country on Earth. Needed was a replacement—not an object, but an equation based on the immutable constants of the universe; like ‘h’, the Planck constant. So a bunch of young American scientists decided to define the hyper-accurate value for ‘h’: they had to link it with Einstein’s E=mc2 on creating mass from energy and so on and so forth. To cut a long story short, the final number for ‘h’ is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000006626069934 kg.m2.s−1.
Now, what would NCERT make of this? Or an HRD minister worth his weight in kilos? Or a hapless academic on a government salary with pension and benefits? Of course, everyone knows ‘h’. It is just a letter. What does a damn letter have to do with a kilogram, which is even spelt without it? Just like nobody has seen a monkey become a man (in politics, it is often the other way around), nobody has actually ‘seen’ energy. Now the Einstein chap came up with, E=mc2, which says mass can be converted to pure energy and energy can create brand new huge objects. What we do know is that anti-conversion law energises masses, but that ain’t science; it is politics.
Our poor NCERT ideologues have much to challenge in order to make Indian education conform to the ancient wisdom of rishis and sages. There seems to be a Western conspiracy afoot as nearly every scientific theory taught to our students is not from India. Since nobody has seen an ape become a chap, nobody has seen Earth move around the sun either.
It’s the sun that rises and sets. We don’t need damn textbooks to tell us. Wasn’t an FIR filed in 1615 by a priest against Galileo, the chap who supported the Copernican theory that Earth revolves around the sun? Subsequently, the Roman Catholic Church declared that Galileo’s theory is contrary to scripture (Joshua 10:12-13) and, therefore, is fake news.
We’re also teaching kids that the moon revolves around Earth, which revolves around the sun. It’s enough to make one’s head spin. And the ridiculous idea that the moon doesn’t fall on Earth is because the planet’s gravitational pull keeps it on its path. Just because Newton saw an apple fall, he concluded there is a theory of gravity. Are there apples on the moon, huh? Then why doesn’t an apple that falls from a tree on Earth not land on the moon? Has anyone ‘seen’ gravity?
You fall because you are pushed or miss a step, right, NCERT? Put that in your next textbook: an apple a day keeps Western toolkits away. A mad Greek named Archimedes jumps out naked from his bath and discovers a theory about the displacement of matter. Is such vulgarity to be taught to our students? The path to true scholarship is to possess a questioning mind. Only, remember, the HRD ministry has the right answers.