Yashomatinandan dasa (NZ) speaks on Srila Prabhupada and the "planet" Pluto

I was saying to Prabhupada how some scientists or people from the university of Auckland I knew found it very difficult to accept Srimad-Bhagavatam because of the fantastic description of the universe given in the Bhagavatam. And Prabhupada questioned me, "How do they arrive at their conclusion? " I said, "Well, Prabhupada they have their mathematics." And Prabhupada immediately retorted, "Yes, but we have our mathematics also." And so not much further developed in the conversation.

I was trying to explain to Prabhupada how the scientists had claimed that the planet Pluto was discovered by their mathematics. How they actually calculated discrepancies in the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter and came to the conclusion that their must be a planet where Pluto was, and it must be of a certain size and so on, to cause the discrepancies by the law of gravity in these different planets' orbits. And when they looked in that position in the sky, there was Pluto.

So theoretically this was meant to prove the mathematics of the scientists. And I was trying to explain this to Prabhupada, but Prabhupada wasn't listening. He said, yes, we have our mathematics, bas.

This incident itself at that time wasn't such a significant thing. In fact, on the tape they made of that lecture, they cut most of that discussion out, nearly all of it. But what makes it significant to me now is that I read in the paper with great interest some time ago, a couple of months ago, an article which had the caption, "If Pluto gets any smaller, then by the year 1984 it will have vanished." The idea of the article was it was going on to explain how from when they first discovered Pluto so-called by this errors in the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter that actually amazingly enough the whole thing was actually a miscalculation and fantastic as it seems, Pluto was discovered simply by chance. That actually they revised their calculations and there was no discrepancies in the orbits of those planets, that Pluto was purely discovered by chance and are going on to say how if Pluto shrank in size at the rate that it had since they first discovered it, or in other words if their conception of Pluto shrank in size, then by the year 1984 it would disappear.

They were postulating that maybe it doesn't exist at all, because when they first found it was so big and so dense apparently. But now they find that it's forty times less dense than they thought and twenty-five times less wide than they thought. And now their conclusion is that it's actually a twin planet, two planets stuck together and completely and absolutely totally different from the original conception they had, and every year in fact they revise their conception of that planet, and so if it continues to decrease in size and density, then by the year 1984 it will have disappeared. This was the joke of it behind the article.

But actually it wasn't a joke for me because I could see that here I put my faith in all my student life in these scientists and in their calculations about the universe, and actually there it wasn't black and white. They were completely wrong. Even their idea of how they found that planet was completely wrong and so it really reinstated my faith in Prabhupada. Not that I lost any faith but it really vindicated by faith in Prabhupada and faith in the Srimad-Bhagavatam. It was good to see how Srila Prabhupada's faith was absolutely unswerving. Even in the face of an apparent scientific proof.

Here is an example of an apparent scientific proof showing black and white that the Vedic scriptures were wrong. Still Prabhupada was absolutely unswerving in his conviction that the Srimad-Bhagavatam mathematics was right and the material scientists was wrong, and it was shown that Srila Prabhupada was right and that the Srimad-Bhagavatam was right and the scientists were wrong.