>> TN's book lacks falsifiability. How can any claim in it be proven wrong? >>
FWIW, not that anyone should even bother to give it a moments thought, there are statements that are open to falsification. In fact they're pretty easy to falsify. Take the example that the structure of DNA, a molecule which has had the same layout since bacteria evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, should be correlated with the planets as counted in jyotish, which in turn depends on the night time visual acuity of human beings. It's not entirely clear why the structure of DNA, billions of years old, should be correlated with the number of planets visible to a recently evolved ape with bad night time vision. But sometime in this century we might find living bacteria on Mars. Mars has a very different arrangement of visible planets and a very different number of nakshatras because it's got two tiny moons that orbit very fast. If TN's (or whoever on purusha thought it up) ideas are correct then the number of planets visible at night by a human being on the surface of Mars, plus things like ascending and descending nodes, should be correlated with the structure of whatever Martian bacteria use for their genetic information. If the ideas aren't correct then there will be no correlation. Even writing down the steps in the argument makes it seem pretty unlikely that it's true. But at least it is a falsifiable statement. If you work through this stuff meticulously then it's pretty easy to find things that don't make sense or don't correlate with reality as we know it and in many cases aren't even logically consistent with other statements in the book. So in that sense it does contain falsifiable statements. In addition a theory should have explanatory power, that is it should solve problems which are otherwise insolvable simply and elegantly. It doesn't do this even remotely, there's no explanation at all, it's just a collection of random correlations glued together with poetic license. The problem is the "True Believer Syndrome", (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome) people who continue to believe wrong ideas even after they've been explained how and why they're wrong. E.g. creationists and so on and so on and so on. Even if you could prove without a shadow of doubt that TN's (or whoever on purusha thought them up) ideas are garbage, people would still believe them. It's a kind of mental illness and explaining to people how these ideas are wrong isn't going to help them. It might help other people who aren't TBs to steer clear of it, but it doesn't help the people who are lost in the intellectual hall of mirrors to find a way out. But AFAIK there are many, even a majority, of the intelligent people remaining in the TMO who feel distinctly uncomfortable about these ideas; they just keep their doubts to themselves because they worry about their position in the movement. Finding out that TN isn't the originator of the ideas, and having it explained how the ideas are worthless anyway can help those people.
