Gates of Heaven-3
Hobok – The Cosmic Web
Go for main Engine start
Go for main Engine start
We have main engine start
Two, One, booster ignition and a final liftoff of Discovery
The shuttle has cleared the tower
The production of this film has been made possible by a generous funding from
‘Bodoor Foundation’.
Discovery now making one last reach to stars using the stress on the shuttle as it goes supersonic.
Discovery Houston, you are go at throttle-up.
Discovery sensors are now throttling down as the orbiter passes through the area of maximum pressure.
Q minus16 seconds, Sound Suppression water system has been activated.
We have a go for main engine start
Q-5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Booster ignition and liftoff of discovery hoisting harmony to the heavens and opening new gateways for international science. Discovery has cleared the tower.
Lift off! Lift off!
Indeed! To some people this is truly the ‘moment of illumination’ in the story of modern science; a full rounded four dimensional moment that triggered, into an almost totally new dimension, man’s age-old quest for answers to a few existential questions. Where did we come from? How did this happen? And what is our destiny? Questions among many that persistently preoccupied our human race since time immemorial.
Ancient myths created by that quest were the outcome of many a civilization. Philosophers and early scientists, driven by human curiosity centuries ago, have had their fair share of search and research.
When darkness reigned, even before the advent of the Middle Ages, those mind expeditions were destined to gain new ground. For a few centuries a remarkable contribution was made to the birth of Modern Age.
But when the torch was about to die out, a few courageous men had ultimately managed, against all odds, to pick up the torch and eventually the pursuit for ‘scientific’ answers acquired a new momentum.
And over the last hundred years man’s quantum leap into almost all realms of knowledge has caused a close encounter to happen for the first time…on another world!
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O.K., engine stop . . .
We copy you down, Eagle.
Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed
“This is a small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
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Since that defining moment mankind is still pushing the cosmic envelope into brave new dimensions of science, discovery….and imagination!
A free leap into space in an artist’s impression seems almost the only gateway to the heavens…a driving force behind Man’s burning desire to fly out and away to see and know his place in the Universe. He is there now; overtaken by awe and wonder, trying to ascend through what seemed for long forbidding frontiers around those cosmic gates….the Gates of Heaven.
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If We were to open for them
A gate into heaven
And they proceeded to ascend through it,
They would say:
Our eyes have been bedazzled.
Rather, we are a bewitched people.
{15/15}
Subtitle Text
Gracious Qur’an
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GATES OF HEAVEN
HOBOK
COSMIC WEB
Heavens perfectly built and adorned is a spectacle that moves sentiments to a graceful awe and wonder. And this doesn’t happen only for poets but not surprisingly, for scientists too. Physicist Michio Kaku reminisces about Einstein’s reaction to that perfection:
“Einstein believed in the God of order. Harmony, beauty, simplicity and elegance. That’s the God that he believed in because he taught the universe was so gorgeous. It didn’t have to be that way. It could have been chaotic, it could have been ugly, messy.”
Order, harmony, beauty, simplicity and elegance are perceptive descriptions of a universe that is also well structured.
With an ever-expanding universe, one question keeps ringing; how does the universe ‘hold’ its pieces together in such expansive formation?
Physicist Brian Greene from Columbia University tells us the beginning of the story: “As the story goes, one day in 1665, a young man was sitting under a tree when, all of a sudden, he saw an apple fall from above. And with the fall of that apple, Isaac Newton revolutionized our picture of the universe.
In an audacious proposal for his time, Newton proclaimed that the force pulling apples to the ground and the force keeping the Moon in orbit around the Earth were actually one and the same. In one fell swoop, Newton unified the heavens and the Earth in a single theory he called gravity”.
Newton claimed that in writing the Principia “I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity”. He saw evidence of design in the system of the world. He wrote: “Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice”.
Hence no coincidence!
Newton’s dictum seemingly recalls a part from Verse 22 Chapter 65 of the Qur’an:
It is He Who upholds
The heaven in place
So it does not fall to the Earth,
Except by His permission
{22/65}
Subtitle Text
Gracious Qur’an
Subtitle Text
One compelling reason to cause the fall of heaven upon Earth is the disappearance of the source of gravity: the Sun
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Brian Greene went on to add that: “If the sun disappears, the gravitational disturbance that results will form a wave that travels across the spatial fabric in much the same way that a pebble dropped into a pond makes ripples that travelled across the surface of the water. So we would not feel a change in our orbit around the sun, until this wave reached the earth.
Newton believed that God alone upholds the Sun and the planets in harmony by the sheer force of gravity that God created and he discovered, thus saving the Solar System from falling upon itself.
Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton’s best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”
Newton’s Laws of Gravity was a landmark step towards understanding how matter is held together in space.
Brian Greene went on to add that “Newton discovered his laws of gravity more than 300 years ago, his equations describing this force make such accurate predictions that we still make use of them today. In fact scientists needed nothing more than Newton’s equations to plot the course of a rocket that landed men on the Moon.
Subtitle Text
Apollo 11 Space Mission
July 16, 1969
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But while Newton’s laws described the strength of gravity with great accuracy, he had no idea how gravity actually works”.
Two hundred and fifty years later the answer to this problem finally arrived.
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Subtitle Text
Newton
Einstein
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Physicist Peter Galison from Harvard University flashes back a bit to explain how “Einstein came to think of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time as bound together in a single fabric of “space-time.” It was his hope that by understanding the geometry of this four-dimensional fabric of space-time, that he could simply talk about things moving along surfaces in this space-time fabric”.
Physicist Brian Greene adds: “Like the surface of a trampoline, this unified fabric is warped and stretched by heavy objects like planets and stars. And it’s this warping or curving of space-time that creates what we feel as gravity.
A planet like the earth is kept in orbit, not because the sun reaches out and instantaneously grabs hold of it, as in Newton’s theory, but simply because it follows curves in the spatial fabric caused by the sun’s presence.
Six times in two paragraphs by Galison and Greene the word ‘fabric’ is repeated.
It may be interesting to note that describing the cosmic web that holds the four dimensions of space-time together in a fabric structure resonates in more than one verse in the Qur’an even the scientists’ vocabulary is quite amazingly identical to the Qur’anic.
How? We’ll soon find out!
Let us first check the significance of the word ‘fabric’.
Fabric by definition in the Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, is ‘any type of cloth made from woven, knitted or felted threads or fibers’. What are the fibers? A fiber is ‘a thin thread which is a long slender thread or filament’. In Webster’s New World Dictionary a fabric is ‘anything constructed or made of parts put together; structure, building’. Moreover it is, according to Webster, ‘the framework or basic structure of anything’. Chambers English Dictionary describes fabric as ‘texture, anything framed…’ also ‘manufactured cloth; any system of connected parts’.
In Verse 7 Chapter 51 of the Qur’an we find a thorough description defining the cosmic structure as ‘fabric’; it appears in an oath taken by God. It reads:
By the heaven
Streaked with fabric
‘interwoven threads’!
{51/7}
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Subtitle Text
Pale Blue Dot
Is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space craft, at the request of Carl Sagan, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. In this photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixels in size) against the vastness of space.
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In his book ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan opens chapter 22, titled ‘Tiptoeing through the Milky Way’ with another oath from the Qur’an; Verses 75 & 76 Chapter 56:
I swear by the shelters of the Stars
A mighty oath, if you but knew it.
{56/76}
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to know and to measure the magnitude of such oath is a job exclusively assigned to Theoretical Physicists, Cosmologists, Astrophysicists and scientists from other domains. According to the Qur’anic tradition God would swear by a phenomenon, be it astronomically colossal or worldly small, observable by us today or yet to be observed tomorrow, only for a reason. In no need to take an oath, God would only do this to draw the reader’s attention to the great importance of the ‘content’ of the oath and to the ensuing information.
Shelters of the Stars, according to Sagan, or Sites of the Stars in other translations would make one wonder; those descriptions of the gatherings of the Stars in the cosmic structure aren’t they most fitting to what cosmologists identify today as the Star Clusters and Star Super Clusters? One would further ponder; aren’t these clusters exactly the Knots and Nodes referred to in every description of the cosmic web?
One cannot resist recalling the Qur’anic word ‘Al Hobok’ at this point! The word stands out as a perfect description of all that.
As is always the case with the Qur’anic Arabic vocabulary and semantics, it only takes most of the time to examine just one word to experience a richness, over a variety of scales, in meaning and shadows of meaning; hence the translation difficulty. Two Arabic words with a preposition in between are translated in English in eight!
Writer Lesley Hazleton, who is currently working on a new biography of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) due in 2012, shares this view of the exclusive semantics of the Qur’an.
“And I began to grasp why it’s said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. Take the Faatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord’s prayer. It’s just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing.”
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‘Al Hobok’, the Arabic word in the Verse describing the cosmic fabric, would come to mean a collection of a variety of textures that are firmly bound together in a certain pattern.
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Subtitle Text:
Force of Gravity
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It also intonates that the interwoven threads are being produced by a systematic method. The textures are shaped across ‘paths’ or lines tightly pulled together over knots arranged on a surface. The word also implies that the interwoven threads are skillfully knitted by a master maker. Finally the word may synonymize with ‘routes extended across a space’.
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Subtitle Text:
The interwoven Cosmic Web as seen from Earth.
Distance: 62.5 million Parsecs
One Parsecs is about 3662,000 light years/ Hubble Law
Distance: 125 million Parsecs
One Parsecs is about 3662,000 light years/ Hubble Law
Distance: 250 million Parsecs
One Parsecs is about 3662,000 light years/ Hubble Law
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Galaxies once were regarded as “Island Universes”, isolated realms of gas, dust and billions of stars that were separated by distances unimaginably fast.
But no galaxy is an island. In fact, galaxies prefer company. The gravitational pull of a large massive galaxy attracts like sized and smaller neighbors. Galaxies may gather in modest groupings like these or congregate by the hundreds in enormous clusters.
This is Abell 1689, one of the largest galaxy clusters known. It packs more than 500 galaxies. This view spans some 2 million light years or about the distance between our Milky Way Galaxy and the nearest big spiral. As astronomers mapped nearby galaxy clusters, a clearer picture of cosmic structure emerged. Galaxy clusters gathered in Super-Clusters and over lapping super clusters formed chains and filaments spanning huge swaths of the sky. Welcome to the Cosmic Web. This all sky map shows structures created by more than a million nearby galaxies.
Deeper studies showed that this pattern continues to even greater distances. The cosmic web appears to be the backbone of our universe.
Knots, chains, filaments, cosmic web, networks …..All these words are semantically associated with the Qur’anic word ‘Al Hobok’. Finally, the word may synonymize with ‘routes extended across a space’.
The Gemini Observatory cosmologists in both its sites in Hawaii and Chile have taken notice of the new Cosmic Web simulations. They noted in 2004 that:
“Such structures look like highways converging onto a large city, but with the important difference that clusters feeding filaments are organized in three-dimensional space”.
Professor Carlos Frenk Director of the Institute of Computational Cosmology, Durham University, England had noted in 2005 that “these collections of thousands of very bright galaxies are very tightly packed together.”
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Now the James Webb Space Telescope is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope. The project is working to a 2018 launch date. Among a list of assignments Webb will peer through dusty clouds to see Stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System; thus further exploring the fabric of our universe. Webb will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km from the Earth.
What will Webb show us? In March 2010 NASA’s Supercomputers, currently ranking number 7 on the world list, are letting us in for a sneak preview.
NASA’s simulations showing ‘how’ the cosmic web is structured are yielding spectacular results all corresponding with the meaning and shadows of meaning of the single Qur’anic word ‘Al Hobok’: the Space-Time fabric.
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The cosmic web investigation gained a new momentum in the mid-1990s by the introduction of a new theory that adds a new word to the entire cosmic web lexicon.
The new word is ‘Strings’. On a cosmic level it is more becoming to label it ‘Super Strings’.
Brian Greene
Prof. Theoretical Physics
University of Columbia
“Here is the new idea of string theory. Deep inside any of these particles, there is something else. This something else is this dancing filament of energy. It looks like a vibrating string — that’s where the idea string theory comes from. And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns, these can also vibrate in different patterns. They don’t produce different musical notes. Rather, they produce the different particles making up the world around us. So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like. It’s is buildup of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies. The different frequencies produce the different particles. The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us.
For all its ambition, the basic idea of Super String Theory is surprisingly simple. It says that everything in the universe, from the tiniest particle to the most distant star is made from one kind of ingredient—unimaginably small vibrating strands of energy called strings.
And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime, amazing possibility.
Until December 2011 the String Theory is still invalidated. If and when confirmed it’ll only enrich and enforce our current understanding of the great structure of the Cosmic Web ‘Al Hobok’.
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The production of this work in its present form would not have been possible without the gracious contribution of these international space agencies that made the visual and literary fruits of their scientific efforts available to all inhabitants of this planet.
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Space agencies logos
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End Credits
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Religion is not something that you should follow blindly. If you have questions, you should do research and find answers.
It is the uncorrupted way to worship God.
So I hope that insh’Allah you’ll find my web page helpful.
So assalamu alaikum wa barakatu and peace be upon you.
