Bengaluru: Former IPS officer and current Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry Kiran Bedi Saturday tweeted a fake video, which claimed that NASA has found that the Sun chants ‘Om’, considered the holiest sound in Hinduism.
— Kiran Bedi (@thekiranbedi) January 4, 2020
The video contains a clear recording of the chant itself, and isn’t the actual video released by NASA. Bedi was immediately called out on social media for posting the clip without checking its veracity.
The video also contains accompanying commentary, in an American English accent, claiming that Greek philosopher Pythagoras had also “heard” these sounds made by the Sun in the 6th century BCE.
The commentator wonders how Hindus were able to hear the Sun’s ‘Om’ emission that human ears can’t normally hear, and says that language, as information, can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also a comment that human speech can be transmitted over radio waves at the speed of light and people can send their “personal energy signature” into the universe.
These statements are factually incorrect. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Also, even sign language is considered as a language, and it travels at the speed of light.
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Original NASA video
NASA did actually release a ‘sounds of the Sun’ video, which can be found on YouTube and its official website. This clip, created by the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, shows vibrations produced by solar magnetic phenomena.
These vibrations are approximately translated into a low, pulsating hum of the Sun.
This video was created with data from the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) that had captured the dynamic movement of the Sun’s atmosphere for over 20 years.
Satellites, Ram Setu and more
Doctored videos, similar to the one Bedi shared, which attempt to establish a pre-historic religious or divine connection to science, have been shared before on social media.
Several members of the current BJP dispensation have come under criticism for propounding ideas that are unscientific in nature.
Ministers have claimed the existence of satellites during the era of Mahabharata, and that a ‘Ram Setu’ — the supposed bridge between India and Sri Lanka that Lord Rama crossed in the epic Ramayana — was built by Indian engineers.
Ahead of the ongoing 107th Indian Science Congress in Bengaluru, an event at which many allegedly unscientific proclamations have been made before, scientists had written to organisers to categorically avoid giving opportunities to false scientific statements.
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