655)Lorne Gunter: Trudeau’s Impact Is Obvious. It’s Also Mostly Bad

Lorne Gunter September 29, 2010

Pierre Trudeau died 10 years ago this week, so of course the tributes and legacy analyses have been coming thick and fast. Among my favourites was offered up by Chantel Hebert, one of the few people worth reading at the Toronto Star.

Well, I have one, too. But unlike most commentators, I come to bury Trudeau (or at least make sure he’s still buried), not to praise him.

While he certainly had a profound impact on Canada, it was mostly destructive. Even the few positive changes he made might be called inevitable; they were the type of changes that were coming to every western society by dint of cultural evolution anyway.

Trudeau was by and large a social engineer convinced of his own intellectual superiority and the cloddish unimaginativeness of nearly everyone else. Not only was he arrogant enough to believe that the natural laws of society and economics can be ignored by determined central planners without consequences, he was also arrogant enough to imagine the light had been given to him more than anyone else, so that he alone possessed the superior knowledge required to see what needed doing and everyone else should defer to him.

Some have argued that legalizing abortion, divorce and homosexuality were bold innovations by Trudeau. Yet nearly every Western nation did the same at around the same time. Trudeau merely ensured Canada was riding the same waves as the rest.

Give him some due. Trudeau faced down the FLQ during the October Crisis of 1970 and a decade later, while much of our chattering class trembled with fear at the prospect of Quebec separation, he shouldered the burden of defeating the sovereigntists in Quebec’s 1980 referendum.

Still, he backed down the separatist terrorists by invoking the War Measures Act and proving just how shallow his vaunted commitment to individual liberties truly was at crunch time. And he won the 1980 referendum at the price of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — which opened the Pandora’s box of judicial activism — as well as two decades of expensive Quebec appeasement that ended in Adscam.

Of course Adscam came long after Trudeau left office. Still, it was a natural and predictable outcome of throwing gobs and gobs of money at Quebec in an attempt to win the province’s federalist loyalty. When the first money thrown failed to buy Quebec’s love, more and more was thrown until there was so much money being sloshed around at projects of diminishing significance that it was inevitable sticky fingers would grab up some.

While not directly Trudeau’s fault, Adscam was a by-product of his chosen method of fighting Quebec nationalism.

His impact on culture was devastating. He implemented official bilingualism in the vain hope that Quebecers would feel more at home in Canada if they knew the post mistress in Houston, B.C. was fluently bilingual. In the process, though, he failed to placate the Quebecois, but managed to alienate millions of anglophones.

Today, four decades and several billion tax dollars later, we are barely more bilingual as a nation than we were when Trudeau began this social experiment and just as divided (or more so) along linguistic lines.

He imagined that multiculturalism would unify us in our diversity – although he never explained how, practically, that logical non sequitor was supposed to happen. Instead, it has led to divisive ethnopolitics, political correctness dictating national policy, the importation of overseas animosities and the ghettoization of large blocks of new Canadians. Even the inflow of refugee claim jumpers can be traced back to the way that Trudeau thought multiculturalism and easy immigration would make Canada more cosmopolitan.

Human rights commissions are part of his legacy, as was the Court Challenges Program that paid minority plaintiffs to file court cases demanding that they be given Charter rights.

After he left office, Trudeau frequently insisted he had fought for a Charter of Rights to protect individuals from the state, and claimed Court Challenges and the Charter’s provisions authorizing judges to “read in” in rights had both been meant to make that protection easier.

How naive.

Activist judges and activist special interest groups quickly learned they could use one another to advance a radical social remake of Canada, and Ottawa would pay for their court appearances. What was meant to be a shield from the power of the state instead created a cozy little cabal among lefty legal scholars and judges that simply shifted the might of the state from the elected Parliament to the unelected judiciary. Both are, after all, branches of government. So the Charter didn’t protect citizens from the excesses of the state, it merely managed to change the whip from one had to another.

Sure, having politicians vote away our rights is bad, but is it really worse than having overreaching judges do the same? At least the politicians we can vote out of office from time to time. Thanks to the Charter, the new boss is the same as the old boss, only also unreachable by the people.

The CRTC is a Trudeau creation, the people who tell us what we may watch on television and listen on radio. So, too, is the notion of the CBC as mouthpiece of social and political activism.
But as bad as that litany is, it is probably on the economy that Trudeau was at his worst.
Inflation, national debt, lost opportunities due to protectionism and economic nationalism — all were Trudeau’s legacy. Because he understood so little about economics and entrepreneurship, Trudeau was easily convinced that history would leave capitalism behind and replace it, if not with socialism, then with some form of command-and-control economy.

His reforms to unemployment insurance (now euphemistically renamed Employment Insurance) ensured our labour market would be badly distorted for nearly 30 years. His scheme of regional transfers — that at one time accounted for 40% of have-not provinces revenue — helped freeze poorer regions’ economies in amber and delay the day when their own desperation would lead to innovation and growth.

He presided over the largest expansion of government in our history; from 1974 to 1976, alone, Ottawa’s spending increased by 50%. He believed we could inflate our way out of debt, so never concerned himself with budget deficit, the consequence of which is an enduring national debt (although Conservative prime ministers have helped him out there). And he implemented wage-and-price controls that further damaged the economy they were meant to resurrect.

He even convinced himself it made sense to beggar a productive region — the West – for the enrichment of less productive ones. So he implemented the National Energy Program, which hurt both the economy and national unity.

Trudeau may have been a great theoretician, but if a solution required even a centesimo of practical understanding — and all successful solutions do — he wasn’t interested.

He may have had more impact on Canada than any other 20th century prime minister. Yet on balance, that impact was mostly bad.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/29/lorne-gunter-trudeaus-impact-is-obvious-its-also-mostly-bad/


Easy Nash

654)A Nod To A Gaggle Of Telus-Coloured Pinkies From Auckland, NZ: It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month And The Colour Is Pink; Quotes From Blogpost 400

"Nature is the great daily book of God whose secrets must be found and used for the well-being of humanity"(Aga Khan III, Radio Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, February 19th 1950)

"A thousand years ago, my forefathers, the Fatimid imam-caliphs of Egypt, founded al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. In the Islamic tradition, they viewed the discovery of knowledge as a way to understand, so as to serve better God's creation, to apply knowledge and reason to build society and shape human aspirations"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25th June 2004, Matola, Mozambique.)

"Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1000 years ago, at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world. The form of universities has changed over those 1000 years, but that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



BREAST CANCER IN DEPTH


1)INTRODUCTION
-Noninvasive Breast Cancer
-Invasive Breast Cancer
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth.htm


2)RISK FACTORS
-Ethnicity and Race
-Inherited Genetic Factors and Family History
-Over-Exposure to Estrogen
-Breast Abnormalities
-Physical Characteristics
-Environmental Factors
-Viruses
-Insulin-Like Growth Factor
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth1.htm


3)PREVENTION AND LIFESTYLE FACTORS
-Exercise
-Dietary Factors
-Soy and Phytoestrogens
-Avoiding Alcohol
-Breastfeeding
-Specific Preventive Measures for High-Risk Women
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth2.htm


4)SYMPTOMS AND SIGNS OF BREAST CANCER
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth3.htm


5)DIAGNOSIS OF BREAST CANCER
-Monthly Self-Examination
-Mammograms
-Other Imaging Techniques
-Biopsy
-Lymphadenectomy
-Sentinel Node Biopsy
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth4.htm


6)PROGNOSIS OF BREAST CANCER
-Location of the Tumor
-Hormone Receptor-Positive or -Negative
-The Influence of Genes
-Tumor Markers
-Other Factors for Predicting Outlook
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth5.htm


7)TREATMENT OF BREAST CANCER
-Local Treatment.
-Systemic Treatment.
-Stage 0
-Stage I and Stage II
-Stage III (Locally Advanced)
-Stage IV (Metastasized Cancer)
-Recurrent Breast Cancer
-The Effects of Emotions and Psychological Support
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth6.htm


8)SURGERY IN BREAST CANCER
-Breast-Conserving Procedures
-Mastectomy
-Breast Reconstruction
-Investigational Minimally Invasive Procedures
-Follow-Up Care
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth7.htm


9)RADIATION TREATMENT IN BREAST CANCER
-Administration of Radiation Therapy
-Side Effects of Radiation Therapy
-Long-Term Complications
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth8.htm


10)MEDICATIONS USED IN BREAST CANCER
-Drugs Used for Breast Cancer
-Considerations for Drug Therapies
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth9.htm


11)CHEMOTHERAPY IN BREAST CANCER
-Adjuvant and Neoadjuvant Regimens
-Chemotherapy and Other Drugs Used in Metastatic Cancer
-Side Effects of Chemotherapy
-High-Dose Chemotherapy with Bone Marrow or Peripheral-Blood Stem Cell Transplantation
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth10.htm


12)HORMONE THERAPY IN BREAST CANCER
-Tamoxifen and Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs)
-Aromatase Inhibitors
-Selective Estrogen Receptor Downregulators (SERDs)
-Progestins
-Ovarian Ablation
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth11.htm


13)LOTS MORE INFORMATION
-Resources
-References
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/breast-cancer-in-depth12.htm



Related posts on this Blog:

Saluting my wife and daughter for walking the 60km walk on the "Weekend to End Breast Cancer" this weekend; the cold hard facts on Breast Cancer.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/401saluting-my-wife-and-daughter-for.html

Cancer Treatment Takes A Giant Step Forward As Scientists Crack Code; Quote From Blogpost Four Hundred.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/535cancer-treatment-takes-giant-step.html



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

653)Scientists Race To Find Dark Matter, The Stuff That Shapes The Visible Universe, In Canadian Mine; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred

Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims. Exchanges of knowledge between institutions and nations and the widening of man's intellectual horizons are essentially Islamic concepts. The Faith urges freedom of intellectual enquiry and this freedom does not mean that knowledge will lose its spiritual dimension. That dimension is indeed itself a field for intellectual enquiry. I can not illustrate this interdependence of spiritual inspiration and learning better than by recounting a dialogue between Ibn Sina, the philosopher, and Abu Said Abu -Khyar, the Sufi mystic. Ibn Sina remarked, "Whatever I know, he sees". To which Abu Said replied," Whatever I see, he knows"."(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)

"In sum the process of creation can be said to take place at several levels. Ibda represents the initial level - one transcends history, the other creates it. The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)

"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html




Scientists race to find dark matter in Canadian mine

Adam McDowell, National PostFriday, Sept. 3, 2010

Wherever there’s a deep hole somewhere in the world, there is a physicist down it trying to shed light on the shadowy secrets of the universe, says Nigel Smith, the director of the deepest hole physicists have yet burrowed into. Exploring the subatomic realm means plunging into the subterranean one: He fastens a light to his hard hat and prepares to head two kilometres into a nickel mine on the 8:30 a.m. cage.

For at least the past 15 years, a global race to be the first team of scientists to illuminate dark matter has consumed the field of particle physics. Canada has dug deep to gamble on being the site of that first definitive, Nobel-worthy brush with the mysterious stuff. SNOLAB, located in an active Vale Inco nickel mine deep underground, near Sudbury, Ont., is the world’s deepest underground laboratory, and thus the one that’s most shielded from distracting cosmic radiation.

Here, various competing experiment teams are vying to be the first to see the blip of an elusive dark matter particle registering on their instruments.

“You’re looking for something that we don’t know is there. We don’t know for a fact that dark matter exists, but there’s very good circumstantial evidence for it,” says Fraser Duncan, SNOLAB’s associate director.

“That’s why a lot of us are putting a lot of effort into looking for it.”

“Canada has put itself firmly at the forefront of this research. That’s why I’m here,” says Dr. Smith, who moved here from England last year to run SNOLAB.

But setting up clean, radiation-limited lab space down a dirty mine is even harder than it sounds.
Fear of a speck of the wrong material in the wrong place drives the process. The sweat from a human finger touching the apparatus, just once, could contain enough naturally radioactive potassium to necessitate a decommissioning of the 12-metre-wide acrylic sphere at its centre — into which tens of millions in research funds have been sunk. And yet in one corridor, a pit is being dustily dug next to sensitive equipment, the two separated by tarps. “We’re mining inside a clean room,” Dr. Smith grins.

Sixty-five million dollars in government funding having been spent expanding the facility over the past six years, experiments are either running now or planned for the next few years. There’s more building on site, and applications for more experiments.

The cool, carefully controlled air of SNOLAB is hot with competition because the identity of dark matter has for years been the burning question at the nexus of particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. Dark matter could hold the answer to whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse in a Big Crunch.

The Large Hadron Collider beneath the Franco-Swiss border may hog most of the glamour for now, but a flurry of headlines, not to mention accolades for the researchers, would likely greet any announcement of dark matter evidence. The facilities play complementary roles in the ongoing quest to understand the universe on its smallest and largest scales.

“We’re attacking the problem from different perspectives,” Dr. Smith says, “but the results all focus in on the same problem. That’s why this is such an exciting time in physics.”

In Sudbury, reaching the possible site of that hoped-for eureka moment involves stepping into the creaky, dark miners’ cage, or elevator, and descending 6,800 feet beneath the surface (slightly more than two kilometres; for comparison’s sake, the famous Inco Superstack in Sudbury — the tallest smokestack in the Western hemisphere — stands 380 meters tall, or 1,247 feet).

From there it’s a walk through a muddy tunnel that Vale Inco has more or less tapped out for mining purposes. Called a drift, it stretches two kilometres before one reaches the front door of the laboratory. Then one begins the careful ablution process required to help keep the 5,000-square metre facility clean.

The 40 or so physicists, technicians and support staff working here make that journey each day on foot. Everything in the laboratory, from super-sensitive pucks of germanium to a crane capable of lifting 10,000 kilograms, must be brought via the cage — piece by piece if necessary — or hooked to the bottom of it. There is no other way in. It’s a ship-in-a-bottle problem, Dr. Smith says, except the neck of the bottle is 2,000 metres long and irregular. Mock-ups the same size and shape as pieces of lab equipment make test runs through the drift to make sure the real thing will fit; leaned against one wall is “Duncan’s donut,” a wooden ring about three metres wide and named for the associate director.

Researchers and technicians scurry to and fro; with three different experiments actively being set up, these are busy days for SNOLAB. Soon the window for visitors will close. Slipping on the standard-issue blue pyjama-like jumpsuit and hair net, Dr. Duncan says, “For the first time we’re starting to have a real sense of competing experiments.”

For physicists, the existence of dark matter is plain as day on a blackboard of calculations, but has so far proven stubbornly challenging to spot in real life.

Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky proposed the existence of dark matter in 1934 after he observed that galaxies spin faster than one would expect, given the matter that is actually detectable. Dark matter does not emit, reflect or absorb light, making it difficult to observe. It comprises around a quarter of the mass in the universe and physicists believe it passes through the Earth all the time. Yet it remains extremely difficult to detect in a world where radiation is everywhere you look, and the chances of a measurable interaction are mind-bogglingly low.

“Dark matter is what causes large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. Normal matter would not have been able to coalesce into stars and planets if dark matter hadn’t been there to guide the process,” Dr. Duncan explains.

“Luminous matter that makes up us — the Earth, the galaxies, other planets — is thought to be the afterthought.”

Dark matter particles are presumed to have mass and gravitational properties, allowing them to act as a glue to mould ordinary matter into planets to galaxies. No one is sure exactly what this dark matter is, but the leading candidate are weakly interacting massive particles — or WIMPs, in the tradition of cute acronyms in physics.

Given the uncertainty about WIMPs, no one is sure of the ideal method of catching up with this scientific Road Runner. The hunt has spawned a variety of snare techniques to make Wile E.

Coyote proud. The common concept behind all of them is to isolate a “target” material, protect it from stray neutrons and radiation, and watch for a rare bump with a WIMP.

SNOLAB’s advantage lies in its depth beneath the Earth, which shields experiments from interference the cosmic rays that bombard the surface at all times. These rays are “noisier” than the subtle effects of WIMPs; Dr. Duncan likens SNOLAB experiments to seeking a quiet forum away from a concert in order to listen to a whisper. Down here, the effect of muon flux, a kind of cosmic radiation, is some 10 million times less than on the surface.

The trick is to be watching and taking measurements on one of the rare occasions when a WIMP makes an interaction with mundane matter. In the example of the Canadian PICASSO experiment, the hope is that WIMPs will collide with superheated bubbles of a carbon-fluoride molecule, bursting them with a distinctive pop audible to sensitive piezoelectronic sound sensors.
Rather than a single breakthrough event, SNOLAB’s director envisions a series of detections that begin to confirm one another.

“The first time you start seeing something, it’s going to be hints of signal. It’s actually easier of course if you don’t see something, because you know you haven’t seen something. If you do see something in your detector, then you need to worry about whether it’s a dark matter particle or a background particle you’ve not rejected or not shielded or protected against,” Dr. Smith says.
“When people start seeing consistent pictures of these particles coming out, then you know that you’re honing in. It’s going to be competitive.”

And wouldn’t it be nice if both the initial spark and the confirmatory follow-ups that led to a first scientific paper on dark matter were to come from Canada’s SNOLAB? “That’s what we’re aiming for,” Dr. Smith murmurs as he sits on a bench in the lunchroom, mid-coffee.

The more experiments that are set up at SNOLAB, the greater the chance of Sudbury being the site of a great leap forward for particle physics.

SNOLAB already has one large underground pit for large-scale apparatus. That was built for the original SNO experiment that, rather than dark matter, searched for solar neutrinos. Two more large pits are at different stages of construction. The “cube hall” will house two large silos for experiments while the “cryopit” has been roughed out, but without a particular experiment being chosen for it yet.

The funding and engineering processes for dark matter and neutrino experiments take years, so it’s best to get going early. However, the basic concepts behind the experiments are driven by physicists’ inspiration. “You can do it on the back of a napkin in an afternoon,” Dr. Smith says.
Meanwhile, to raise the probability of a WIMP bouncing off a particle of ordinary matter, scientists have made their detectors bigger, by factors of 10 or more per phase of their projects. Quite simply, the more matter there is for a WIMP to crash into, the greater the chances of a collision. Hence the need for room to grow.

Whatever the right technique or combination of techniques for WIMP-hunting turns out to be, Dr. Duncan says, “There’s certainly the strong possibility that Sudbury can discover these things. It’s absolutely safe to say that SNOLAB is at the forefront of this very competitive field. The facility we have is the best operational facility for doing this physics.”

Similar but shallower facilities exist in Japan, Russia, China, Europe and the United States. The competing, and larger, Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, located underneath an average 1.4 kilometres of rock, is reckoned to offer the equivalent of 4,000 metres of water to shield experiments from cosmic rays. SNOLAB is rated at 6,100 metres, or more than 50% more.
In 2008, a team working at Gran Sasso observed what it claimed were brushes with dark matter. Some physicists have called that result a false alarm, and the observations remain unpublished.

“My view is if something’s not published, it’s a blog,” Dr. Smith says.

Since then, Sudbury has become a particle physics hot spot as experiments move in to SNOLAB.
Last month, the U.S.-based Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) team announced it was seeking funding to move its hockey puck-sized germanium crystals to Canada and set up at SNOLAB.

“Sometimes it’s summed up that we’re the best in the world at seeing nothing,” said Richard Schnee, a Syracuse University physics professor who acts as principal investigator on the CDMS project, in an interview last month. The project’s next phase, should it be funded, would seek to listen for dark matter with a detector 100 times more sensitive.

On Wednesday, the team behind another U.S.-led experiment, COUPP (for Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics) switched on a four-kilogram detector. Twenty-three-year-old PhD candidate Alan Robinson, originally from Vancouver, looks forward to a physics career during interesting times.

“There’s lots of opportunities out there, especially at the moment,” he says as colleagues cover the apparatus with insulation. “And there’s nothing like particle physics for getting your hands dirty, and for getting your thinking on.”

SNOLAB was proposed before Mr. Robinson was born, and actually predates the frenzy of research into dark matter. A group of five Canadian universities collaborated to start building the facility in the early 1990s as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, a specialized centre for research into neutrinos, particles that probably have nothing to do with dark matter. Excavation to expand the facility has been ongoing since 2004.

“We evolved from an experiment that needed a specialized underground laboratory to a much larger underground laboratory that is designed to house several experiments simultaneously,” Dr. Duncan says.

SNOLAB was already the site of a major breakthrough. Neutrinos are elementary particles of extremely low mass that are difficult to detect. For decades, physicists were puzzled by the fact that the sun seemed to give off fewer neutrinos than the modelling had predicted. In 2001 an international team of scientists led by former SNOLAB director Arthur McDonald announced SNO project results that led to a new understanding of neutrinos, “solving” what was known as the solar neutrino problem.

The neutrino experiments here form part of SNEWS, a worldwide distant early warning system for supernovae. When a star explodes, the neutrinos escape the blast before light does, and so reach the Earth first. The hope is that the next time a star goes nova, neutrino detectors somewhere on Earth will alert telescope operators with enough warning to turn their gaze to the right part of space in time to take the first pictures of the start of such a cataclysm to be seen by human eyes.

In the meantime, to tour SNOLAB is to listen to a litany of worries over radiation and dust. It takes thousands of person-hours of work to transform each section of corridor from hot, dry, muddy mine into clean, cool, slightly moist laboratory space.

The nitpicky obsession with cleanness extends to the properties of everything that comes inside the airlock system — even before it arrives: Pucks of germanium for dark matter experiments are shipped here, not flown, because to elevate them into the stratosphere would indelibly mark them with cosmic rays.

The greatest worry is that a mistake could invalidate or call into question any breakthroughs logged here. The crucial task is knowing one’s detector and its environment inside and out.
“Really most of the problem is understanding your detector so you can make your calibrations,” Dr. Duncan says.

“That’s essential for the credibility of any result,” Dr. Smith agrees. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/story.html?id=3480080



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

652)Stephen Hawking Suggests 'Theory Of Everything' ; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.

"Science is a wonderful, powerful tool and research budgets are essential. But Science is only the beginning in the new age we are entering. Islam does not perceive the world as two seperate domains of mind and spirit, science and belief. Science and the search for knowledge are an expression of man's designated role in the universe, but they do not define that role totally....."(Aga Khan IV, McMaster University Convocation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 15th 1987)

"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Here is a relevant verse from the Noble Qur'an, cited by Nasir-i Khusraw, hujjat-i Khurasan in his Khawaan al-Ikhwaan : "It is He who created you from dust, then from a sperm drop, then from a blood clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then lets you reach your age of full strength, then lets you become old - though some of you die before - and then lets you reach the appointed term; and that haply you may find the intellect (la'allakum ta'qilun)."(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



Tue Sep 7 2010
By Carl Hartman
The Associated Press

"The Grand Design" (Random House, $28), by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:

Cosmologists, the people who study the entire cosmos, will want to read British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking's new book.

"The Grand Design" may sharpen appetites for answers to questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "Why do we exist?" — questions that have troubled thinking people at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.

Hawking likes the tale of the old lady who accused a lecturing cosmologist of talking nonsense: She knew for a fact that the whole universe lies on a flat plate, borne on the back of an enormous turtle.

"What does the turtle stand on?" the lecturer asked.

"Another turtle," she replied. "It's turtles all the way down."

For some readers, the answer from Hawking, known for his work on black holes and author of the bestselling "A Brief History of Time," and physicist Leonard Mlodinow, may not be much more satisfying.

The "grand design," says Hawking, is to be found in M-theory, an idea launched in the mid-1990s.

Annoyingly, there's no agreement on what the "M'' stands for. The authors suggest "master," ''miracle" or "mystery." Others have also been proposed, but none of these names offers the layman much help in answering the basic questions.

"According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god," the book says. "Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law."

This idea may trouble anyone who was fair at high school math but didn't major in the subject in college.

"M-theory has solutions," the book says later, "that allow for many different internal spaces, perhaps as many as 10 (followed by 500 zeros), which means it allows for 10 (followed by 500 zeros) different universes, each with its own laws."

A layman may wonder if one of those multitudinous laws might furnish a simple explanation of why something exists instead of nothing — and also wonder if there might be no such law in any of the possible universes.

Hawking writes that M-theory is a unified "theory of everything" that Albert Einstein was looking for but never found.

"If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design."

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100907/entertainment/us_book_review_the_grand_design



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

651)The Ismaili: Passing Of Influential Professor Of Islamic Studies, Mohammed Arkoun, Leaves ‘A Gap That Will Be Impossible To Fill’

from Ismaili.org :

Earlier this week, the world lost one of the most influential minds in contemporary Islamic Studies.

Professor Mohamed Arkoun passed away in Paris on 14 September 2010 at the age of 82. An outstanding research scholar and a rigorous critic of the theoretical tensions embedded in the field of Islamic Studies, he was a courageous public intellectual and a powerful voice in the frequently contentious debates on Islamic modernism and humanism.

“Mohammed Arkoun was not only a great scholar, but a public intellectual, committed to rethinking contemporary issues related to Islam and modernity,” says Dr Shafique Virani, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. “He will be dearly missed, but the freshness and innovation of his approach lives on through the many students and colleagues whom he impacted.”

A native of Algeria, Mohammed Arkoun was born in 1928 in Taourit-Mimoun, a small village in Great Kabylia. His mother tongue was Berber, with French being his second and Arabic his third language. He studied at the Faculty of Literature of the University of Algiers and at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Professor Arkoun was Professor Emeritus of the History of Islamic Thought at the Sorbonne, a post that he held since 1993. His career, spanning more than five decades, took him to universities in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. He wrote extensively on Islam and modernity, and his critical approach endeavoured to rethink the role of Islam in the contemporary world. His sophisticated interrogation of the issues provided a welcome counterpoint to the highly ideological debate about Islam in both the Muslim world and the non-Muslim West.

Professor Arkoun was also a Senior Research Fellow in The Institute of Ismaili Studies’ (IIS) Department of Academic Research and Publications, and a Member of its Board of Governors. Dr Ali Asani, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures at Harvard University, served on the Institute’s academic steering committee with him. He says that “Professor Arkoun stands out among contemporary Muslim intellectuals.”

“[He] courageously challenged scholars of Islam and Muslim societies to rethink the traditional categories and methodologies through which we analyse the role of religion, religious texts and institutions in Muslim societies,” adds Professor Asani.

Professor Arkoun played a significant role in shaping Western scholarship on the Muslim world. As the editor of Arabica, he maintained the journal’s high standards of scholarship while broadening its scope considerably. He was the author of numerous books in French, English and Arabic, including most recently: Rethinking Islam (1994), L’immigration: défis et richesses (1998) and The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (2002),. His shorter studies have appeared in many academic journals and his works have been translated into several languages.

However, Professor Arkoun’s ideas were complex, and his writing was rarely easy reading. Dr Amyn Sajoo, a scholar at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures in Vancouver, recalls the first time that he worked with Professor Arkoun, around 2001:

Arkoun was the first speaker in the IIS's Civil Society series of talks, which I hosted in 2000. Naturally, I invited him to contribute to the book coming out of that series — Civil Society in the Muslim World (2002) — and he agreed. When the draft arrived, it read like a novel by Marcel Proust — full of clever ideas with no clear order. I set about being a busybody editor, and his chapter ended up looking rather different from the original. What would the great scholar say to this messing with his text by someone he had barely heard of?

As I sat across from him, Arkoun flipped through the edited draft, his eyebrows going up and down, a ‘hmm’ every so often. Finally, he looked up and mused with a wry smile: ‘I understand.’ He knew that great and original ideas had to be melted down if they were to mean something to the general reader. It was a lesson for every scholar to cherish — and the beginning of a warm relationship.

Professor Arkoun’s involvement with the Ismaili Imamat traces back to a seminar of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture held in Fez, Morocco in October 1979, where he met Mawlana Hazar Imam. He went on to become an active and enthusiastic participant in the Award, serving on its Steering Committee for four cycles, and later as a member of its Master Jury for two cycles.

Recalling their work together on the Award in 1980s, Dr Mohamed Keshavjee says the professor espoused a unique outlook on architecture and its potential for catalysing positive change.

“At a formative stage in the development of the Award, he brought a new dimension to its discourse, highlighting some of the seminal issues facing Muslim societies in the 20th century as they tried to balance their traditions with their contemporary needs,” says Dr Keshavjee, who served with with Professor Arkoun on the Board of Governors of The Institute of Ismaili Studies. “He often spoke of the role of architecture in society with particular reference to those who were marginalised.”

Professor Arkoun saw the Award as a valuable “process of thinking” that engenders “a space for freedom, in which all crucial debates, made taboo by the devices of censorship and self-censorship in the present Islamic world, could be carried on with intellectual responsibility and shared concern between the West... and the Islamic world.”

Professor Arkoun at the 2005 IIS Summer Programme in Islam. Photo: Shahed Karim
He sought to recreate that space for freedom with his students, challenging them to revaluate preconceptions with a critical eye. Sahir Dewji, who recently completed the Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities at the IIS used to look forward to his lectures and was moved by Professor Arkoun’s passion for the issues of the Muslim world.

“He offered an epistemological approach within the study of Islam that encompassed everything from the Qur'an to the lives of Muslims today,” says Dewji. “For him, it was necessary to examine the complexities of Islam through a multitude of lenses — from philology to anthropology to sociology.”

Professor Arkoun’s critical perspectives on the issues of our day and his ability to challenge the way contemporary problems are conceived and considered, will undoubtedly be studied for years to come by scholars and students alike.

“The field of Islamic Studies is indebted to him for his refreshing and innovative perspectives,” says Professor Asani. “A brilliant mind and a gentle soul, he leaves a gap that will be difficult, if not impossible, to fill.”

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.

http://www.theismaili.org/cms/1087/Passing-of-influential-professor-of-Islamic-Studies-leaves-a-gap-that-will-be-impossible-to-fill


Related Posts:

In Memory of Professor Mohammed Arkoun
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111895

Mohammed Arkoun – FRONTIER OF THE MIND
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/mohammed-arkoun-frontier-of-the-mind/



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

650)Arabic In The Sky: Saudi Aramco World Magazine Comes Up With A Comprehensive Article On Astronomy In Medieval Islam; Quotes From Blogpost 400

"And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration"(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

"Astronomy, the so-called “Science of the Universe” was a field of particular distinction in Islamic civilization-–in sharp contrast to the weakness of Islamic countries in the field of Space research today. In this field, as in others, intellectual leadership is never a static condition, but something which is always shifting and always dynamic"(Aga Khan IV, Convocation, American University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, June 15th 2006)

"From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought"(Aga Khan IV, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1996)

"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)

"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952)

"Nature is the great daily book of God whose secrets must be found and used for the well-being of humanity"(Aga Khan III, Radio Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, February 19th 1950)

"O brother! You asked: What is the [meaning of] `alam [world] and what is that entity to which this name applies? How should we describe the world in its entirety? And how many worlds are there? Explain so that we may recognize. Know, O brother, that the name `alam is derived from [the word] `ilm(knowledge), because the traces of knowledge are evident in [all] parts of the physical world. Thus, we say that the very constitution (nihad) of the world is based on a profound wisdom"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet, from his book "Knowledge and Liberation")

"Tarkib' is composition as in the compounding of elements in the process of making more complex things, that is, of adding together two things to form a synthesis, a compound. Soul composes in the sense of 'tarkib'; it is the animating force that combines the physical elements of the natural universe into beings that move and act. Incorporating is an especially apt word in this instance. It means to turn something into a body, as in 'composing'. But it is actually the conversion of an intellectual object, a thought, into a physical thing. Soul acts by incorporating reason into physical objects, the natural matter of the universe and all the things composed of it"(Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani,10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971CE, from the book, 'Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary', by Paul Walker)

Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)

The above are 16 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of around 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



Arabic In The Sky
Robert Lebling
saudiaramco.com

Scholars have identified 210 visible stars that carry Arabic names, some of which preserve older names that date back to Babylon and Sumeria. In this illustration, the 30 brightest stars with Arabic names appear as eight-pointed stars, in sizes adjusted for their relative magnitudes, or brightnesses.

On March 3, 1995, when American astronomers Andrea Dupree and Ronald Gilliland trained the orbiting Hubble Telescope on the constellation of Orion the Hunter, they captured a historic photograph: the first-ever direct image of the disk of a star other than the Sun.

Until then, star photographs had shown only points of light, but Dupree and Gilliland produced an image large enough to give the star a shape. The center of the bright orange image showed a mysterious hot spot twice the diameter of the Earth's orbit, surrounded by an ultraviolet atmosphere that emits prodigious amounts of radiation.

The star was Betelgeuse, one of the most famous of the red supergiants and the second brightest star in Orion.

The odd name of Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, comes from an Arabic original whose first letter was inadvertantly changed by a 13th-century astronomer. Second brightest in Orion, the star that was originally named in Arabic yad al-jawza’ appears (top) at the upper left, and above, in an antique-style rendition, at the end of the sleeve of the hunter’s tunic.

Betelgeuse (pronounced beetle-jooz or sometimes bet-el-juice) is an odd name—but then most of the common star names sound strange to the western ear. The reason is that most of them are of Arabic origin: Aldebaran (“The Follower”), Algol (“The Ghoul”), Arrakis (“The Dancer”), Deneb (“Tail”), Fomalhaut (“The Fish's Mouth”), Rigel (“Foot”), Thuban (“Snake”), Vega (“Plunging [Eagle]”).… The list goes on.

The derivation of Betelgeuse is more problematic than most, but experts today trace the name back to the Arabic yad al-jawza', “The Hand of the Giant”—the giant being Orion. A transcription error, confusing the initial letters b and y (in Arabic, ba and ya) because of their similar shape, dates back to the 13th century, when a star table by John of London (who lived and worked in Paris) named the star Bedalgeuze. Accepting this form, European scholars like the French polymath Joseph Scaliger thought the name meant “Armpit of the Giant” (properly, ibt al-jawza'). But yad al-jawza' goes back at least as far as the star charts of the Muslim astronomer al-Sufi in the 10th century and is probably much older than that.

The 48 traditional star constellations—Andromeda, Hercules, Perseus and so on—have Latin names, and most of them represent Greek mythical figures. These names were passed on to us by Ptolemy of Alexandria, the second-century Egyptian–Greek astronomer whose view of the universe was bequeathed to the medieval world. (Many of the Greek star figures were themselves borrowed from the myths of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.) But many of the popular names of the visible stars in these constellations are nevertheless Arabic. Some came from the star pictures that early Bedouins saw in the night sky; others were Arabic translations of Ptolemy's Greek terms. Many of these names would be immediately recognized by Arabs today; others would not.

Some of the star names are fragments of longer Arabic names—often shortened to fit on medieval astronomical measurement devices called astrolabes. Some have been distorted beyond recognition over the centuries, due to transcription and copying errors. At least 210 of the stars most easily seen with the naked eye have names derived from Arabic words, according to science historian Paul Kunitzsch of the University of Munich, an acknowledged expert on Arabic star names.

Kunitzsch has done extensive research on the transmission of Arabic star names into European usage. Of the 210 Arabic star names he identified, he finds that 52 percent come from authentic Arabic originals, 39 percent from translated Ptolemaic originals, and 9 percent from conjecture, erroneous readings or artistic choice.


The First Wave

Most of the Arabic star names we know today can be traced back to the treatises of al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer of the 10th century who wrote in Arabic. His Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars built on Ptolemy’s second-century Almagest. This plate is a 15th-century interpretation of al-Sufi’s constellations of Centaurus and Leo.

The first wave of transmission of Arabic star names to Europe took place in the Middle Ages, from the 10th to the 13th centuries, and included about 48 names of the 210. This was the only period of direct “borrowings,” where star names were translated directly from Arabic star catalogs into corresponding European astronomical works. Most of the transmission occurred in Spain, where Christian astronomers were eager to learn from Muslim ones.

Kept alive for centuries by mariners, explorers and other stargazers, the Arabic star names are a living testimony to the golden age of Arab–Islamic astronomy. From the ninth to the 15th century, scientists working in the Arabic language, in a region stretching from Islamic Spain across North Africa and the Middle East to India, dominated worldwide scientific endeavor and provided the raw material for Europe's intellectual renaissance. Astronomy was one of the greatest of these pursuits.

Before Copernicus in the early 16th century, European and Muslim astronomers alike followed the cosmological model set forth by Ptolemy of Alexandria. According to Ptolemy, the Earth, at the center of the universe, was surrounded by a series of concentric translucent shells to which were attached the moon, sun, planets and fixed stars. The Arab astronomers translated Ptolemy's Greek star names into Arabic, and added some of their own that had been passed down by nomadic ancestors who used the stars and star-pictures to guide their passage through the great deserts of the Middle East. According to Kunitzsch and others, the Arabs also preserved star names from the Mesopotamian civilizations of the Sumerians and Babylonians.


Sidebar
Billions and Billions

Our universe, scientists say, contains about 100 million galaxies, or nests of stars, of which our own, the Milky Way, is one. In fact, the word galaxy comes from the Greek galaxias, meaning “milky.” The Milky Way is made up of some 50 billion stars.

The apparent brightness of a star is indicated by its “magnitude.” The brightest 20 stars are called “first magnitude.” First-magnitude stars are about 2.5 times brighter than second-magnitude stars; second-magnitude stars are about 2.5 times brighter than third-magnitude; and so on down to stars barely visible to the unaided eye, which are called “sixth magnitude.” This is an ancient system, used by the Greek astronomers Hipparchus and Ptolemy, that survives virtually unaltered to our day. The Islamic astronomer al-Sufi was particularly skilled at observing and recording stellar magnitudes using the Greek techniques.

Of all the billions of stars in the night sky, about 6000 stars from our galaxy and others—down to the sixth magnitude—are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Some 900 million—down to the 21st magnitude—yield enough light to be captured in photographs.

Of the visible 6000, only 1025 were named by Ptolemy in his Mathematike Syntaxis, better known as the Almagest. And of these, some 210 of the brightest and most visible stars have modern names of Arabic origin.
End of sidebar


Most of the Arabic star names we use today can be traced back to the star catalogue of the astronomer al-Sufi, known in medieval Europe as Azophi. His full name was Abu 'l-Hussain 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Omar al-Sufi, and he is recognized today as one of the most important scientists of his age.

Born in Rayy, Persia, in the late ninth century, al-Sufi studied and wrote in Arabic. Under the patronage of the Buwayhid Dynasty, he conducted astronomical observations in his homeland and in Baghdad, capital of the realm. His mentor was Ibn al-Amid, the vizier of the Buwayhid ruler. Ibn al-Amid wrote the foreword for one of al-Sufi's books, a major work on the astrolabe.
Al-Sufi was a conscientious observer of the fixed stars. In his day, the definitive guidebook for study of the stars was many centuries old: the Almagest, compiled by Ptolemy in about 150 ce.

The Almagest was Ptolemy's greatest mathematical and astronomical work, and it had a major influence on Islamic and European science for more than a millennium. In 903, al-Sufi published the first-ever critical revision of Ptolemy's star catalogue. He corrected erroneous observations and added others not recorded by the Greek master astronomer. Al-Sufi's treatise on star cartography, or uranography, was called The Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars (Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib al-Thabita) and became a classic of Islamic astronomy.

The book covers all 48 constellations in the Ptolemaic system. The stars of each constellation are described in detail—positions, colors and brightness, or magnitude—with criticisms of some of Ptolemy's measurements that al-Sufi found to be in error. Al-Sufi's work was groundbreaking science for several reasons. It provided real star observations, at a time when most astronomers relied on the ancient measurements of Ptolemy's star catalogue.

It was also the first scientific effort to identify the old Arabic star names with astronomically located stars. Before al-Sufi, the wealth of star names had been handed down in literary or philological works, with little regard for identifying which stars they actually applied to. Al-Sufi was not 100 percent successful in his identifications, for some of the names were associated with more than one star in a single constellation or with several stars in different celestial images. But he pinned down most of them, so that his catalogue became the primary source for Arabic star names for centuries to come. Most of the names that we use today came to us from al-Sufi's list, either via the European–Mediterranean civilization of the Greeks or through the Arab–Islamic civilization. (The process was complicated by the fact that the Arabs translated Ptolemy's work, including its Greek star names, into Arabic and passed it along to the Europeans, who had lost the original Greek version until the 15th century.)

The very earliest Latin sources for Arabic star names were two 12th-century instruction manuals for astrolabes: De mensura astrolabii by Hermann of Reichenau and De utilitatibus astrolabii, attributed from earliest times to Gerbert d'Aurillac but now considered to be of uncertain authorship (with one section attributed to Hermann). Both works, probably composed in Spain, contain a handful of Arabic star names whose form has remained unchanged down to the present day, including Aldebaran, Algol, Alhabor (an alternate name for Sirius), Rigel and Vega.

Picture:
This celestial map or macrocosm is the opening miniature in the Turkish Zubdat al-Tawarikh, or History of the World, showing the seven heavens above the Earth, the signs of the zodiac and the 28 lunar “mansions.” The model for it is essentially Ptolemaic, that is, Earth-centered, even though it was produced in 1583, four decades after Copernicus proposed the solar-system model we know today.

Al-Sufi's work first became known in the West through Spain, where Christian and Muslim kingdoms coexisted and, when they were not jostling for influence or territory, cooperated. Christian king Alfonsox of Castile (known as Alfonso the Wise), a serious student of astronomy, ordered a free translation or adaptation of al-Sufi into Old Spanish, called the Libros de las Estrellas de la Ochaua Espera (1252–1256), and added it to his omnibus astronomy “textbook” known as the Libros del Saber de Astronomía (Books of Astronomical Knowledge). This opus also included the Alfonsine Tables, which furnished new data for calculating the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets in relation to the fixed stars, and revised the numbers in the Toledan Tables originally compiled by Andalusian astronomer al-Zarqali (called Arzachel in Europe) several centuries earlier.

Picture:
In a 13th-century Turkish miniature, Aristotle instructs students in the use of the astrolabe, a tool for measuring astronomical altitudes. First invented in Greece, it was extensively refined by Arab astronomers.

In the East, meanwhile, al-Sufi's book was regarded as canonical and was relied upon through the centuries by the great astronomers of the Islamic world, including one with a substantial impact on the West, Ulugh Beg of Samarkand (1394–1449). The nomenclature of the later Oriental star catalogues, celestial globes and other instruments went back mostly to al-Sufi or Ulugh Beg.

“Ulugh Beg” means “the Great Prince.” His real name was Muhammad Taragay. Raised in the court of his grandfather, the Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), Ulugh Beg spent much of his youth traveling throughout the Middle East, moving from one conquered city to the next. After Tamerlane's death, his son Shah Rukh inherited most of his realm, known to us as the Timurid Empire, and Shah Rukh appointed his own 16-year-old son Ulugh Beg to rule over Samarkand, the old Timurid capital, while he went on to establish a new political capital for the empire in Herat, Afghanistan. Ulugh Beg ruled Samarkand and its surrounding province for 40 years. He served briefly as ruler of the overall Timurid Empire, succeeding Shah Rukh, from 1447-1449.

Ulugh Beg became not only a patron of mathematics and astronomy but also an exceptional astronomer himself. He believed that the “hard sciences” were different from theology and literature, that they transcended societal and religious boundaries and were held in common by all peoples, regardless of faith or language. The prince collaborated with numerous leading scientists of his day and founded at Samarkand one of the largest and most important observatories in the Islamic world. Supporting the observatory was a center for astronomical studies; Ulugh Beg handpicked its scientists from among the empire's best. At its peak the observatory employed 60 to 70 working astronomers. With these impressive scientific resources, Ulugh Beg set in motion a project to compile the Zij-i Sultani star catalogue (published in 1437), listing names and freshly observed positions for 994 fixed stars, a work often described as comparable to al-Sufi's. In fact, the catalogue included 27 stars from al-Sufi's own work that were too far south in the heavens to be observed from Samarkand.


The Second Wave

The second wave of Arabic-origin star names arrived in late-Renaissance Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. During this period some 22 additional Arabic star names entered common use in Europe, both among scientists and in literature. Most of them were introduced by a German lawyer and amateur astronomer named Johann Bayer.

Bayer was born in Rain, Bavaria in 1572. He studied philosophy at Ingolstadt University and later earned a law degree at Augsburg. He worked as a lawyer in Augsburg and served as a magistrate there. Bayer also happened to be a talented and serious amateur astronomer, and in 1603, at the age of 31—just six years before Galileo introduced the first telescope to the field of astronomy—Bayer published an important astronomical work, the Uranometria, which has been described as the first modern star atlas, and which became the standard reference for all later atlases. Though later astronomers named new constellations and introduced new projection systems, as well as totally different artistic styles for drawings of the constellations, the Bayer influence was always present: The Uranometria is always the implied standard of comparison.

Sidebar:
Arabian Bear
o see how frequently we encounter Arabic names among the visible stars, look up in the northern night sky and locate one of the most easily recognizable constellations, Ursa Major (the Great Bear)—commonly known in North America as the Big Dipper because its seven main stars resemble a bent-handled water-dipper. All of these stars, from handle to bowl, have Arabic-origin names:

Alkaid—from al-qa’id, “The Leader”

Mizar—from mi’zar, “Loincloth”; originally called Mirak, from maraqq, “Loins”

Alioth—probably mistranscribed from Aliore, derived from al-hawar, “White Poplar” or “White of the Eye”

Megrez—from maghraz, “Root of the Tail”

Phecda—from fakhdha, “Leg”

Merak—from maraqq, “Loins”

Dubhe—from dubb, “Bear”
End of sidebar


The Bayer atlas contains 51 star maps or charts—one for each of the 48 traditional constellations of Ptolemy, plus a chart of the recently discovered southern skies and two planispheres, or flat representations of the celestial hemispheres (northern and southern). The Uranometria's star maps were engraved on copper plates by Alexander Mair and are large, over 37 centimeters (141/2") across. Each has an engraved grid, so the star positions can be determined to a fraction of a degree. Bayer took these highly accurate celestial positions from the new star catalogue of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, which had circulated in manuscript form in the 1590's but was not printed until 1602, one year before the Uranometria.

An important feature of Bayer's atlas was his new system of star nomenclature. He assigned Greek letters to the brighter stars, usually in order of magnitude. For example, the bright star in Taurus, the bull's eye, became α Tauri or Alpha Tauri. The Greek letters were recorded on the charts themselves and also in accompanying tables. Today's astronomers still use the binomial designation invented by Bayer.

For our purposes, however, the most relevant feature of the Bayer atlas is his recording of popular names for important stars, drawn from the works of Ptolemy and his successors, to assure that all known stars could be identified with those listed in the Bayer atlas. Bayer relied in large part on the first printed edition (published in Venice in 1515) of Gerard of Cremona's 1175 Latin translation of the Arabic version of Ptolemy's Almagest, as well as on the Alfonsine Tables and other parts of the astronomy “textbook” of Alfonso x, including an old-Spanish (Castilian) translation of al-Sufi's Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars. He also consulted important commentaries on these works by Joseph Scaliger and by the Dutch philosopher and theologian Hugo Grotius.

In 1665, English orientalist Thomas Hyde published the first-ever translation of Ulugh Beg's star tables for European readers, with an extensive commentary on the star names. This Latin work, published at Oxford, bore the appropriately scholarly title Tabulae longitudinis et latitudinis stellarum fixarum ex observatione Ulugh Beighi. As we shall see, this translation and commentary was particularly valuable during the third wave.

Among the other scholars who contributed Arabic star names to the European corpus during the second wave were three noteworthy Germans:

Jakob von Christmann (1554–1613) was an orientalist who developed an interest in astronomy and in 1590 published a Latin translation of the writings of al-Farghani (called Alfraganus in Europe), a prominent ninth-century Abbasid astronomer who worked at the famed Baghdad center of learning, Bayt al-Hikma.

Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635), mathematician, astronomer and orientalist, invented a mechanical calculating machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide—a device sadly lost in the chaos of the Thirty Years' War and forgotten for three centuries.

Philippus Caesius (Philipp von Zesen) (1619–1689), poet and author, wrote a work in Latin in 1662 about the constellations and the legends attached to them, in the light of contemporary astronomy.

Picture:
In the late 1700’s, Giuseppe Piazzi of Palermo cataloged 6784 star names, producing what became the standard reference work of the 19th century.


The Third Wave

The third wave of Arabic star names came to Europe in the early 19th century. As in the second wave, western astronomers took what became modern star names not from the original Arabic sources, such as al-Sufi or Ulugh Beg, but from translations of these sources—that is, from European renderings of the Arabic star nomenclature. Some 140, or two-thirds, of the Arabic-origin names entered the European star charts during this period, 94 of them from a single star catalogue published in 1803 by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826).

Piazzi, a native of Lombardy, is perhaps best known today for his discovery of the first “asteroid,” Ceres, in 1801. (Ceres, with a diameter of about 950 kilometers [590 mi], is now considered a dwarf planet.) Piazzi, a Catholic priest, taught higher mathematics and then astronomy at the University of Palermo. Prince Caramanico, viceroy of Sicily, commissioned him to build an observatory there. In preparation, Piazzi spent from 1787 to 1789 in France and England, studying practical techniques under world-class astronomers and acquiring instruments for the Palermo Observatory. The most famous of these acquisitions was a unique 150-centimeter (5') circular-scale altazimuth telescope built by the renowned instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden of London. Piazzi used this telescope in compiling his famous star catalogue, containing 6784 stars (7464 entries in the revised 1814 edition), recorded with an accuracy never before possible.


Sidebar:
The Summer Triangle

Three stars with Arabic names dominate the late-summer sky toward the east in the northern hemisphere: Vega, Deneb and Altair. Each is part of a separate constellation, but due to their brightness, they appear linked together as the “Summer Triangle.”

Blue-white Vega in the constellation Lyra (the Lyre of Orpheus) takes its name not from Spanish but from the Arabic word for “plunging” (waqi’) as applied to an eagle swooping down. The ancient Egyptians—as well as the people of ancient India—also viewed this constellation as an eagle. Vega is Lyra’s only bright star. Relatively close to Earth, some 25 light-years away, it is also one of the very brightest stars in the sky.

Deneb (Arabic for “Tail”) is the tail of the swan, Cygnus, and the brightest star in that constellation. Deneb has had other Arabic-origin names, most of them linked to the posterior of a fowl. Johann Bayer called the star Arrioph, from al-ridf, “The Hindmost.” Deneb is a blue-white supergiant, some 60,000 times more luminous than the Sun, but because it is very distant, it appears as the 19th-brightest star in the night sky. Deneb’s exact distance from Earth is uncertain, but the most likely estimates place it at about 1500 light-years away.

Picture:
As in other fields of learning, Muslim Spain played an important role in the transmission of astronomical knowledge to Europe. This 1986 Spanish stamp honored the astronomer and instrument-maker known as al-Zarqali.

Altair (“The Flier”) is the brightest star in Aquila, the Eagle, and the 12th-brightest in the sky. It is a “dwarf” star, just under 17 light-years from Earth, and one of the closest stars visible to the naked eye. Its name is short for al-nasr al-ta’ir, “the flying eagle,” a term applied by early Arabs to the three main stars of the constellation. There were instances when the brightest star alone (Alpha Aquilae) was given the name of the entire group, for example, on astrolabes, and the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians also called this very luminous star the “eagle star.” In modern movie lore, Altair is the solar system of The Forbidden Planet, a classic 1956 science-fiction film inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
End of sidebar.


For star names, Piazzi's Palermo catalogue relied heavily on Hyde's 1665 translation of the Ulugh Beg star list. (Despite its age, Hyde's work had remarkable staying power, being reprinted, with corrections, at Oxford in 1767 by Gregory Sharpe and in London in 1843 by Francis Bailly, among others, up to the modern era.)

“Piazzi fashioned his new names from Hyde's transcriptions of the names used by Ulugh Beg in the table text as well as names and endings brought forward in the commentary from all other sources,” Kunitzsch said in his 1959 classic Arabische Sternnamen in Europa (Arabic Star Names in Europe). “In general he does not follow Hyde's orthography very exactly. Many simplifications are introduced.” Piazzi also occasionally relied on German astronomer Johann Bode's star atlas Uranographie (1801) for some of his star-name forms, Kunitzsch found. Whatever their sources, Piazzi's star names enjoyed wide circulation. His catalogue was regarded as a standard reference work of the 19th century and was of great value to European and North American astronomers well into the 20th century.

Several other western scholars played significant roles during the third wave. Ludwig Ideler (1766–1846), a prominent Prussian chronologist and astronomer, made some noteworthy contributions to the understanding of Arabic star names. In 1809, he published a major work on the origin and meaning of star names that incorporated his own translation of the astronomical section of Zakariya' al-Qazwini's popular 13th-century cosmography, 'Aja'ib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation), supplemented with notes from classical and other sources.

Ideler was the first western scholar to divide Arabic star names into two groups: truly Arabic names and those which the Arabs fashioned by translating Ptolemy's Greek descriptions of stars' positions in the constellations. Ideler's book was used as a basic reference source in the West for over 150 years. Sadly, as Kunitzsch and other modern experts note, Ideler did not have access to al-Sufi's book on the fixed stars, and his work is riddled with errors due to his use of unreliable and chiefly secondary Arabic sources.

Richard Hinckley Allen (1838–1908), an American churchman, teacher and naturalist from Buffalo, New York, was another important figure in the third wave, known more for his passion than for his accuracy. He became interested in the history of star names after coming across a reference to a star with a strange name: Hamal (“The Ram” in Arabic), also known as Alpha Arietis, the first star in the constellation Ares. His interest developed into a hobby and then into a lifelong avocation. As was said at a memorial service after his death, “Like a prophet of the night, when the light of the day had vanished, he would name star after star, ... speaking of their relations to one another, and of the meaning of their names, as if he were more at home among their glories than most men would be with the persons and things of their daily environment.”


Picture:
istanbul university library / bridgeman art library (detail)
Working in the Galata Observatory founded near Istanbul in the late 16th century by the Turkish astronomer Takyuddin, astronomers had access to the best reference works and technology of the era.


Allen compiled a comprehensive work on star-name lore, published in 1899 as Star-Names and Their Meanings (later reprinted as Star-Names: Their Lore and Meaning), which drew much of its material from Ideler and thus repeated many of that scholar's errors. But Allen also helped popularize the names we have encountered that passed from Ptolemy and al-Sufi to Ulugh Beg and Bayer and Piazzi, as well as along other routes. Allen's book was if anything more influential than Ideler's on the popular understanding of star names, particularly those of Arabic origin, and is still often quoted today. Some of Allen's variants on these names have ended up in modern reference works, including the American Nautical Almanac and Webster's International Dictionary. At the same time, most of Allen's predecessors—the European and Arabic-speaking astronomers, cosmographers, philologists and others that he cites extensively in his book—remain shrouded in obscurity and in many cases have been virtually forgotten.

These, then, were the waves of knowledge that brought the Arabic-origin star names to the West:

The First Wave of medieval times, with the greatest number of Arabic star names, including the Ptolemaic corpus (150 ce), moving from al-Sufi (964 ce) to the astronomical compendium of Spain's King Alfonso x.

The Second Wave of the late Renaissance, with most of the star names moving from the first printed edition of the works of Alfonso x (1483) and from the first printed edition of Ptolemy's Almagest (Gerard's 1175 Latin translation from Arabic, published in 1515) to Bayer's Uranometria (1603).

The Third Wave of the 19th century, with most of the star names transmitted from al-Sufi to Ulugh Beg's star list to Hyde's translation (1665) to Piazzi's Palermo star catalogue (1803).

In part because of this complicated transmission process, the Arabic star names in use today are neither uniform nor consistent but rather, according to Kunitzsch, “a conglomeration of heterogeneous words fashioned at different times and in different ways.” Direct borrowings happened only during the Middle Ages. The word formations of the second and third waves are indirect borrowings—cases in which astronomers have taken terms from translations that appear in the European literature. But regardless of the nature of the borrowing, the process continued for almost a millennium, with new influxes of Arabic star names entering the literature of the West from time to time through the centuries. This process resembles, in a way, the periodic pulsations of brightness of the star Algol in Perseus, sometimes referred to as “The Winking Demon”—a star that, as you know by now, was named for us by the Arabs.


Robert W. Lebling is a writer and communication specialist based in Dhahran and a longtime contributor to Saudi Aramco World. His latest book is Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar (I.B.Tauris, 2010).

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201005/arabic.in.the.sky.htm



Related posts on this Blog:

A Collection of Posts on Astronomy; Quotes of Noble Quran, Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan III, Nasir Khusraw, Abu Yakub Al Sijistani and Aristotle
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/05/613a-collection-of-posts-on-astronomy.html

Kepler Telescope Detects Possible Earth-Size Planet, Bringing Us Closer To Answering The Question: Are We Alone In The Universe?
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/08/645kepler-telescope-detects-possible.html



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

649)What A Difference Four Hundred Years Makes: Sir Isaac Newton, Man Of Science AND Religion; Stephen Hawking, Man Of Science NOT Religion.

Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking lived around 400 years apart in the span of history. They occupied the same posts and chairs at Cambridge University in England, now considered the top university in the world, having displaced Harvard University in the latest world university rankings:

British physicist Stephen Hawking will step down from one of the most famous academic posts in the world this week.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58T44R20090930


Their views on the link between Science and Religion are very different, however, and this becomes evident when one reads these two blogposts of mine:


Sir Isaac Newton: Man of Science and Religion.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/283sir-isaac-newton-man-of-science-and.html



Brilliant, Severely Disabled Scientist Stephen Hawking, Approaching The End Of His Natural Life Span, Rejects Divine Role In Universe's Creation.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/09/648brilliant-severley-disabled.html



Quotes of Aga Khan IV:

"The Divine Intellect, Aql-i Kull, both transcends and informs the human intellect. It is this Intellect which enables man to strive towards two aims dictated by the faith: that he should reflect upon the environment Allah has given him and that he should know himself. It is the Light of the Intellect which distinguishes the complete human being from the human animal, and developing that intellect requires free inquiry. The man of faith, who fails to pursue intellectual search is likely to have only a limited comprehension of Allah's creation. Indeed, it is man's intellect that enables him to expand his vision of that creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11, 1985)

"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



Easy Nash http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/ http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

648)Brilliant, Severely Disabled Scientist Stephen Hawking, Approaching The End Of His Natural Life Span, Rejects Divine Role In Universe's Creation.

"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



Tuesday, September 07, 2010

No Need for God? Stephen Hawking Defies Divine Creation
Albert Mohler
Crosswalk.com

By any measure, Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and influential figures in modern science. For thirty years, he served as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and his career before and after his decades in that post is the stuff of scientific legend. He is also probably the longest-living person ever to be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [ALS], and the very fact that he has been productive since that diagnosis at age 21 is a testimony to his sense of personal mission and sheer determination.

Professor Hawking is out with a new book, and in The Grand Design, he, along with co-author Leonard Mlodinow, now presses his case against God — or at least against any role for God in the origin of the universe or the beginning of time.

Asking the most basic questions of the universe's existence, Hawking and Mlodinow assert: "Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

In the pages of The Wall Street Journal last week, Hawking and Mlodinow summarized their case against God. After presenting a case for the incredible fine-tuning that was required for conscious life on earth, they argued that the incredible "coincidences" involved in this fine-tuning are not evidence of the work of God. To the contrary, they conclude that science can provide all the necessary answers: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." The headline of their article, "Why God Did Not Create the Universe," pulled no punches.

Major newspapers and media outlets across the globe announced that Stephen Hawking had now come out against belief in God. Yet, a closer look at the evidence suggests that this is actually nothing new for Professor Hawking. All of the major arguments presented in The Grand Design have appeared earlier in Hawking's previous books or in interviews.

As has been argued before by others, Professor Hawking tends to deploy arguments about God when he wants to sell books. Nevertheless, given his stature and influence, his ideas are worth careful attention.

The major thrusts of The Grand Design are the magnificence of the universe and the glory of theoretical physics. Hawking is committed to what he calls "M-Theory," a "super-string theory" that encompasses a host of theories and predictions about the nature of matter and time. Most importantly, this theory allows Hawking and Mlodinow to advance Hawking's theory that space and time have no boundary. If such a boundary did exist, Hawking allows that God might be a necessary or allowable theory of how all this began. But, if there is no boundary, there is no reason for God at all — the universe is self-explanatory.

Hawking actually believes that there are countless universes, and that the laws of physics on each might be radically different from all the rest. What we do know is our own universe and its operational laws, and these, he insists, do not require any notion of a divine Creator.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing," Hawking and Mlodinow explain.

But is this really new? In his 1988 best-seller, A Brief History of Time, Hawking made very similar arguments and received strikingly similar press coverage. "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator," he explained. But, Hawking rejected the very idea of a beginning as such, and so he actually dispensed with the need for any Creator. Furthermore, he was certain that his theories rendered any belief in a traditional deity to be groundless.

In his infamous introduction to the first edition of A Brief History of Time, the late astronomer Professor Carl Sagan asserted, "This is a book about God . . . or perhaps about the absence of God." Even more famously, Sagan argued that Hawking's theories meant that there is now "nothing for a Creator to do." Oddly, when A Brief History of Time was reissued for a tenth anniversary edition, Sagan's introduction was deleted.

Hawking has acknowledged that his work "is on the borderline between science and religion, but I have tried to stay on the scientific side of the border." That seems a strange comment, given the fact that he so routinely crosses that border.

On the other hand, that statement does betray another straightforward dimension of Hawking's thought. He seems to imagine God only in terms of a deistic deity and a "God of the gaps" who serves as a causal explanation only when all naturalistic theories run out of steam. If nothing else, Hawking's writings should warn Christians from taking refuge in any "God of the gaps" form of theological argument. If we invoke God only when we run out of other explanations, we will find God disappearing into a cloud of theory and endless theological surrender.

The God of the Bible is not merely a First Cause — He is the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all that is, who rules the universe by His Word. Christians must recognize the "God of the gaps" as a false idol of theological surrender. Furthermore, Christians must also understand that any scientific admission of God as a possible First Cause without continuing rule over creation is no cause for celebration. The triune God cannot be reduced to a First Cause among other causes.

Stephen Hawking's worldview is based in positivistic scientism. He really believes that science holds all the answers. "Philosophy is dead," he asserts in this newest book. Why? "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."

In his 1980 inaugural address, given as he was installed as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Hawking proposed that the great project of theoretical physics might be concluded by the end of the twentieth century. "By this I mean that we might have a complete, consistent, and unified theory of the physical interactions which would describe all possible observations."

That statement speaks profoundly to Professor Hawking's intellectual ambition — to explain the universe and all of its "possible observations." That is nothing less than titanic in scale of ambition. Indeed, it is the quintessential audacity of a brilliant secular mind.

Professor Stephen Hawking is a remarkable human being. His courage and tenacity are an inspiration to all. His work on the theory of gravity has changed the way the field of physics is taught. But, when he crosses that border from science to theology, his worldview leads him into abject disaster. The Grand Design is yet another attempt to celebrate the universe's breathtaking design, while denying the existence of a Designer. It will not be the last.

http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/mohler/11637624/


Related:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/hawking-rejects-divine-role-in-big-bang-creation-of-the-universe/article1693616/?cid=art-rail-technology

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100907/entertainment/us_book_review_the_grand_design


Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)