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This week I bring you a wild conversation with my friend S. Prashant Kumar, who's writing a dissertation in the history of time itself. To tell this story he's looking at a bunch of cosmological inquiries in India. We talk about the beginning of the story, this telling moment when a smart young man on the make, Reuben Burrow, went to India to make his fortune. He worked as a surveyor. But he also mucked around with astronomy and anthropology, and believed that he had discovered proof of the existence of paradise.... He believed that by studying Indian astronomical data, he had found evidence of a time when the earth had not spun on its axis, when there were no seasons, and when everything was perfect.
It's a great conversation, and I can't wait for you to hear it.
Reading List:
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
Schaffer, Roberts and Raj, The Brokered World Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence
Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline
Harald Meller, 2200 BC-A climatic breakdown as a cause for the collapse of the Old World?