Carl Sagan
and Fritjof
Capra have pointed out similarities between the latest scientific
understanding of the age of the universe, and the Hindu concept of a "day
and night of Brahma", which is much closer to the current known age of the
universe than other creation myths.
According to Sagan:
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to
the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern
scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day
and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth
or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.
Capra, in The Tao of Physics, wrote:
This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which
involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in
modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the
universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to
develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific
models.