Gates of Heaven-5
In Her Orbit
Day in Day out
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 minus 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.
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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
It is a small step for man
A 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}
Subtitles: Gracious Qur’an
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Day and Night. Here’s one phenomenon that might seem to many too ordinary to ponder. The recurrence of the daylight and the night darkness in loops had been happening since the creation of the Solar System, scientists say, about 4.5 billion years ago.
But the truth is; we live by it.
To an enlightened astronomer of old who identifies a ‘daytime’ as the period a planet takes to complete one rotation about its axis, the Qur’an’s indication to the ‘creation of a day and a night’ following each other in an interchanging pattern, will seem to be an interesting argument. For in order to alternate both phenomena of day and the night the fluctuating shift has to be the outcome of a motion of a ‘round’ planet incessantly ‘revolving’.
In the case of planet Earth, the act of revolving would only call for one description; the planet is spherical and rotating.
The concept of spherical Earth had been a subject for conjecture by ancient civilizations. Early 6th century BC Greek philosophers alluded to a spherical Earth, though with some ambiguity. In the 3rd century BC Hellenistic astronomy established the idea of the spherical shape of the Earth.
A practical demonstration of Earth’s roundness was achieved by Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world; a grueling journey that took him about two years from 1519 to 1521 and finally cost the Portuguese sailor his life. Mankind had to wait for more than four centuries after Magellan to attain the ultimate proof of the planet’s sphericity. The first human in space Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had succeeded in orbiting planet Earth in only one hour and 48 minutes, in his Vostok 1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961. Now the planet is not only visually round but also mathematically spherical. The ensuing NASA and international space agencies programs have been since then bringing in a wealth of new information about planet Earth.
Geo-Centric ideas had dominated astronomical thinking for about 1500 years since Ptolemy of Alexandria’s astronomical treatise ‘Almagest’ got authored in the first century AD. Ptolemy’s model, like those of his predecessors was almost universally accepted until the appearance of simpler Helio-Centric model during the Scientific Revolution; a historic development that was sparked by the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’ in 1543.
In her 2002 remarkable book “The Ornament of the World” Spanish scholar Maria Rosa Menocal points out that the invaluable contribution of Muslim scholars to various scientific disciplines, including astronomy in medieval Spain for nearly 700 years, has largely been overlooked or obscured in many Western circles. Author Bryn Barnard, in a book published in 2011 attributes their achievements to “The Genius of Islam” that have been making the modern world for the last 500 years.
Inspired by verses from the Qur’an, like these from the Prophets and Yasseen Chapters, a number of Muslim medieval astronomers had devoted a great deal of observation and scholarly work to finally confirm the Heliocentric Model. The published works of Al Khazen, Abu Rayhan Al Biruni, Ibn Al Shatir, Al Quzwaini, Al Tusi, Al Zamakhshari and Fakhr Al Deen Al Razi among others were translated into Latin and read at the Andalusian libraries over three centuries; the 11th thru the 13th, thus preceding Copernicus by at least 200 years.
In his major work “Al Tafseer Al Kabeer” (published around 1179) author Fakhr Al Deen Al Razi defends the concept of heliocentrism with a major difference; that the Sun is not mentioned as a static object or as a center of the Universe.
“Even though the Earth is described as a bed in one verse, in another it is portrayed as a sphere” he wrote. “Spherical earth is revolving around the Sun. If questioned “How do people and objects maintain their balance on the Earth if the Earth, as a sphere, is revolving around the Sun?” my answer will be that the Earth is such a huge sphere where flat surfaces are in abundance.”
During the time of the Qur’anic revelation in the first half of the sixth century AD, man’s accumulated knowledge concluded that only the Sun moves while the Earth stands still. Although the support was unanimous to Geo-Centrism at that time, the concept does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an.
It is He Who created
The Night and the Day,
And the Sun and the Moon:
All (the celestial bodies)
Rotate (swimming) along, each in its
Ordained orbit.
Verse 33, the Prophets Chapter
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The Qur’an states more than once that all heavenly bodies perpetually ‘move’ in preordained orbits.
And the Sun
Runs its course
For a period determined
For it; that is
The decree of (Him),
The exalted in Might,
The All-Knowing.
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And the Moon–
We have measured for it
Mansions (to traverse)
Till it returns
Like the old (and withered)
Lower part of a date stalk.
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It is not permitted
To the Sun to catch up
The Moon, nor can
The Night outstrip the Day:
Each (the Sun and the Moon) just
Swims along
In (its own) orbit
(According to the Law)
Verses 38, 39, 40 Yasseen Chapter
Opposition to Helio-Centrism was staunchly formidable on all levels until the first half of the 17th century. In his book ‘Pale Blue Dot; A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ published in 1994, Astronomer Carl Sagan quotes the Cardinal, and later on Saint Roberto Bellarmino, the foremost Vatican theologian in the early 17th century saying:
“….But to affirm that the Sun is really fixed in the center of the heavens and that the Earth revolves very swiftly around the Sun is a dangerous thing, not only irritating the theologians and philosophers, but injuring our holy faith and making the sacred scripture false.”
No wonder Bellarmino was the one who presided over the court that tried Galileo for his ‘blasphemous’ belief in Helio-Centrism and eventually sentenced him to denounce his science or face burning alive at the stake. Galileo had to repent in public before being forced to house arrest until his demise in 1642.
As unscientific as it was, Bellarmino’s argument would seem ‘Reasonable’ when compared to an astonishing thesis presented as a “flat-Earth” map drawn by an Orlando Ferguson in 1893! In a Bellarmino-esque move he throws in an attached text a multitude of biblical texts denouncing the concepts of Earth’s sphericity and mobility. Ferguson sums up his debate in the map’s title and subtitles:
Map of the
SQUARE AND STATIONARY EARTH
Four Hundred Passages in the Bible that Condemns the Globe Theory, or the Flying Earth, and None Sustain It.
This Map is the Bible Map of the World.
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Ferguson wasn’t alone. The entire European Medieval legacy had embraced this misconception of flat Earth. Although this error has had no currency in historical scholarship since at least 1920, it surprisingly persisted in popular culture and in some school textbooks into the 1960s!
The Qur’an, revealed 14 centuries ago, stresses in full harmony with modern astronomy both the sphericity and mobility of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and all heavenly bodies rotating in ordained orbits.
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Pondering the sequence of night and day in the Qur’an reveals more than anyone would thought at the time.
We read in Verse 5 Chapter 39 of the Qur’an:
He created the heavens
And the earth
With ‘absolute’ truth.
He coils the night
Upon the daylight,
And He coils the daylight
Upon the night.
For He subjugated the
The sun
And the moon
‘to a perpetual order’
Each one travelling ‘its orbit’
For a stated term
‘Preordained by Him’.
Most surely,
He ‘alone’
Is the Overpowering ‘One’,
The Most Forgiving.
{39/5}
Subtitles: Gracious Qur’an
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The Qur’anic Arabic wordيكور , in the present participle mode; translated here to ‘coil’ means making a ball-shaped object. The noun كرة means a ball. Hence a ball-shaped Earth structure was made clear to the yesterday reader of Qur’an as it is today. At the time of the revelation 1400 years ago such a conclusive description of our planet was not available anywhere. It is interesting to know that to coil denotes the act of coiling a turban into a ball-shaped headgear common in male costumes in the Middle Eastern and a few other cultures. Winding the night and the daytime into loops is an act of permanent coiling of light around the planet.
The Qur’an even tells us about a phenomenon that no Earth dweller could have ever conjectured until Man lifted off and traveled the space in the 60s of the 20th century. God takes an oath in Verse 40 Chapter 70 that reveals the simultaneous occurrence of multiple sunrises and sunsets on Earth:
I do swear
By the Lord
Of all sunrises
And of all sunsets
That truly We are all-able
{70/ 40}
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Only a viewer from space can confirm that. Astronaut Jose Hernandez was a crew member in the August 28, 2009 space shuttle Discovery STS-128 mission to the International Space Station.
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Subtitles: Jose Hernandez, Astronaut/Discovery STS-128, International Space Station 2009
“You go around the Earth every 90 minutes, so you see a lot of sunrises and sunsets. You do not go around the same place of Earth because it is rotating as you go around it. Furthermore, the climate, the clouds are changing. So each time you go around, it’s like an artist’s palate. It’s like a new painting. A new artist’s painting. It is never the same. So you never get tired of going around the Earth and looking outside because the picture is always different and it is so beautiful. “
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The motions of the Sun and the Moon are indicated more than once in the Qur’an; a controlled pattern in absolute harmony.
In Verse 40 Chapter 36 we read:
It is not for the sun
To overtake the moon,
nor for the darkness of the night
to outstrip the daylight.
For each, within a course,
Is orbiting
‘through the spheres
As preordained’.
{36/40}
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Subtitles: Richard Varley, Association of Muslim Police, UK
“I feel that those signs probably were not understood when the Quran was revealed. And that’s why a lot of scholarly work then was on the other meanings of the Quran and the interpretations of those meanings and these verses that we are discovering now were mystery by large.
The original Arabic word for ‘orbiting’ in the Verse would read; swimming in orbit….a sensational overtone of floating in graceful motion. One could now listen to Astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy describing the Solar System in his own words:
“They’re all in the same plane. We’re all going around in the same direction. It’s perfect, you know. It’s gorgeous. It’s almost uncanny”.
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The word ‘perfect’ in Marcy’s words takes us once more to Verse 6 Chapter 50 of the Qur’an:
Have they not looked ‘thoroughly’
At the heaven above them,
‘to see’ how ‘perfectly’ We built it
And adorned it?
Nor has it ‘even’ a ‘single’ flaw.
{50/6}
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Heavens perfectly built and adorned is a spectacle that moves sentiments to a graceful awe and wonder. More importantly it calls for searching for the Great Designer of this magnificent architecture.
Physicist Michio Kaku reminisces about Einstein’s reaction to that perfection:
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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…
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Subtitles: From US
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.
