Jean Sylvain Bailly

Jean Sylvain Bailly (French: [bɑji]; 15 September 1736 – 12 November 1793) was a French astronomer, mathematician, freemason, and political leader of the early part of the French Revolution. He presided over the Tennis Court Oath, served as the mayor of Paris from 1789 to 1791, and was ultimately guillotined during the Reign of Terror.

Jean Sylvain Bailly in 1789

Quotes

• That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modem] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs.”
  • Quoted in S. Sathe: In Search for the Year of the Bharata War, Navabharati, Hyderabad 1982, p.32. , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived Hindus their knowledge.
  • Jean-Sylvain Bailly. source:: The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus some 4500 years before vary not even a single minute from the modern tables of Cassini and Meyer.
  • Jean-Sylvain Bailly. source: World as Seen Under the Lens of a Scientist, Dr Vithal B. Shetty Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Even before Jones's announcement, Bailly stated that "the Brahmans are the teachers of Pythagoras, the instructors of Greece and through her of the whole of Europe" (51).
  • quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1

• The astronomer and onetime mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, in his Histoire de I'astronomie ancienne et moderne (1805), felt that "these tables of the Brahmana are perhaps five or six thousand years old" (53;). Bailly approved of the traditional date of the Kali Yuga, and seemed to have convinced at least some of his colleagues such as Laplace and Playfair of the accuracy of the Indian astronomical claims (Kay, [1924] 1981, 2). This was bitterly opposed by another astronomer, John Bentley ([1825] 1981), with a concern that we have seen was typical for the times: "If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction" (xxvii).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12