Trumpusk 🇺🇲

A king travelled to another world for what seemed like moments. When he returned, 116 million years had passed. There is a super nuts story preserved in ancient Indian religious literature that describes something similar to what physics calls time dilation. The story appears in the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana. According to the story, King Kakudmi took his daughter Revati to Brahmaloka, the realm of the creator deity Brahma, to seek advice about a suitable husband. When they arrived, Brahma was listening to celestial musicians. They waited for the performance to finish. Nothing particularly unusual happened during their visit. They listened to the music, approached Brahma and explained why they had come. Then Brahma laughed. The men Kakudmi had been considering for his daughter were dead. Their children were dead. Their descendants had disappeared. The Bhagavata Purana, Book 9, Chapter 3, Verse 32, gives a crazy specific number. Twenty seven complete cycles of the four yugas had passed on Earth. In traditional Hindu cosmology, one cycle represents 4,320,000 years.Multiply that by 27. 116,640,000 years. A father and daughter leave Earth, visit another realm, experience what seems to them like a brief interval, and return to find that more than 116 million years have elapsed. The Vishnu Purana, Book 4, Chapter 1, is interesting as it explicitly states that Kakudmi perceived the passing of entire ages as though they were a moment. This was being described in Sanskrit literature long way way humanity developed modern theories of spacetime. For context, the Bhagavata Purana is commonly dated to approximately the eighth through tenth centuries CE, although its traditions may be older. The Vishnu Purana also preserves the account in a different literary form. These are not twentieth century stories retrofitted with scientific language. Modern physics established that elapsed time is not necessarily identical for every observer. Motion and gravity affect how time is measured. Does that mean the people who preserved this account understood relativistic physics? Of course that has not been established. But they were describing an extraordinary difference in experienced time between two realms, with numerical periods that extend into millions of years. We can interpret Brahmaloka as a divine realm, another plane of existence, or a place entirely outside the ordinary human experience of time. What inspired people more than a thousand years ago to describe two individuals leaving our world, experiencing a brief visit elsewhere, and returning after entire geological ages had passed? Was this simply a sophisticated religious illustration of cosmic time? Or were they preserving an idea about the nature of reality that we are only beginning to understand? I don't think we should confuse an ancient account with scientific evidence. But I also don't think we should overlook how extraordinary the story is.