"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, Speech,1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)
"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, 2004, Matola, Mozambique.)
From the Institute of Ismaili Studies, December 2007:
Al-Azhar (The Luminous) was constructed as the central grand-mosque for Cairo by al-Qaid Jawhar al-Siqillí when he took Egypt for the Fatimid Imam-Caliph al-Mu‘izz li Dín Allah in 969 CE and founded Cairo as its capital city. It was inaugurated on 7 Ramadan 361 AH / 22 June 972 CE. Possibly so-named after Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima al-Zahra, through whom the Fatimids traced their genealogy back to the Prophet.
Throughout the Fatimid period, al-Azhar played a vital role as one of the main mosques for the Imam-Caliph’s Friday prayers, where the Imam-Caliph himself often delivered the sermon; and also as an epicentre of religious learning. Various scholars, including the son of Imam-Caliph al-Mu‘izz’s famous jurist al-Qadí al-Nu‘man, ‘Alí b. al-Nu‘man and Imam-Caliph al-‘Azíz’s vizier, Ya‘qub b. Killis, delivered lectures there on Fatimid law, theology and other subjects. These majalis formed an important part in the dissemination of Fatimid knowledge. There were also majalis convened especially for women.
Imam-Caliph al-‘Azíz assigned several scholars to a house near al-Azhar and made provisions for their support. They held lectures and sessions in the mosque. Al-Azhar was also one of the main mosques in which the official appointment letter of the chief judge was read out in public; and where the qadís (judges) presided over cases. On important occasions, gatherings were held here and the structure was brightly lit up. Meals were also offered at these occasions.
Following the Fatimid period, al-Azhar was sidelined by the Ayyubids but restored and expanded by the Mamluks as a grand-mosque and a centre for religious instruction. Even though now it was one of many religious academies, it retained its primary position because of its history and its location at what was, until the eighteenth century, the political, economic and social centre of Cairo.
Some of the more well-known scholars to have lived and taught at al-Azhar were Ibn al-Haytham (d.430 AH/1039 CE) and later Ibn Khaldun (d.808 AH/1406 CE). Even during the Fatimid era, there were renovations and additions made to the structure. During the Ayyubids rule, post-Fatimid from the late 12th to the late 13th century CE, it lay in neglect. The Mamluks then added a great deal to the mosque and surroundings up to and including the 18th century CE.
Today, al-Azhar is still one of the most important grand-mosques of Cairo. As a centre for learning, it was transformed, beginning in the late nineteenth century under the Ottoman Pashas, into a modern, multi-disciplinary, multi-faculty university with campuses around Cairo and other cities in Egypt, with affiliations to institutes and learning centres internationally.
Al-Azhar has always attracted students from all over the Muslim world, as it does to this day. Its collections are renowned for the large number of manuscripts of the Muslim theological sciences that they hold(End of IIS article)
Click on the original IIS link to see pictures of Al-Azhar:
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109087
It is interesting that one of the scholars who taught at Al-Azhar University during Fatimid times was the renowned scientist Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen. Bradley Steffens, award-winning prolific author, poet and lyricist, wrote this about Ibn al-Haytham:
"Born in Basra in 965, Ibn al-Haytham was the first person to test hypotheses with verifiable experiments, developing the modern scientific method more than two hundred years before European scholars learned of it—by reading his books":
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/296one-mega-post-encompassing-four.html
Mawlana Hazar Imam has opined on the very great importance of applying the open-ended Scientific or Experimental method in academic scientific studies but always within the context of the total and all-encompassing knowledge expounded by religion:
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, 1993, Aga Khan University Convocation, Karachi, Pakistan)
"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, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
320)Preston Manning pretends to be a 17th century Roman Catholic Cardinal writing a letter to Richard Dawkins, Atheist; Quote of Aga Khan III
"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)
201)Preston Manning pretends to be a Roman Catholic Cardinal writing a letter to Richard Dawkins; Atheists, the new Spanish Inquisitioners?
OPEN LETTER: TO PROF. RICHARD DAWKINS
An Inquisition in science's name
Preston Manning imagines what one 17th-century cardinal would tell an eminent atheist
PRESTON MANNING
June 20, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper
Dear Prof. Dawkins:
I am writing to you as one who was once as convinced as you are that I understood the nature of reality and how it was best interpreted. Like you, I also regarded those who embraced alternative conceptions of reality as dangerously deluded, and did everything in my power to prevent their further propagation.
Unfortunately, in pursuing this course of action, my colleagues and I made a grievous mistake - a mistake that, in the end, seriously discredited ourselves, our conception of reality and the organizations through which we advanced and defended it.
I am writing this letter in the sincere hope of dissuading you, the author of The God Delusion, and your colleagues - scientists and atheists, as I believe you describe yourselves - from repeating our mistake and thereby inadvertently discrediting the methods and institutions of science.
My name is Robert Bellarmine. I was born in Tuscany in 1542 and joined the Jesuit order in 1560. Like you, I became a professor at a leading university. I specialized in theology, then considered "the queen of sciences," much like biology is becoming the queen of sciences in your century. Eventually I was summoned to Rome by the Pope and made a cardinal and archbishop.
The conception of reality to which I, along with the most highly educated people of our time, subscribed was that revealed by faith and scripture as interpreted by the Holy Catholic Church.We regarded our definition and interpretation of truth as a sacred trust that we were obliged to promote and defend. But notwithstanding our control of higher education, our authority was increasingly challenged by those who claimed there were alternative routes to truth.
Like you, we at first regarded the proponents of these views as deluded and sought to counteract their influence by teaching and persuasion. It was at this point, however, we made our great mistake.
When these delusions continued to spread in number and variety, we felt obliged to take harsher measures. We labelled the deviants "heretics." We established the Office of the Inquisition to hunt them down and expose the fraudulence of their claims, and to sentence them to the most extreme penalties if they refused to recant. We burned their books and then we burned the heretics themselves.
With the passage of time, we no longer confined our pursuit of heresy to the obviously ignorant and deluded. We extended it far and wide - I myself even became involved in the trial for heresy of the eminent astronomer Galileo Galilei.
What was our great mistake? It was to assume that we the church had an absolute monopoly on how truth was to be defined, discovered, and interpreted; to ignore the teaching of the great apostle of our own faith that at best, "we see through a glass darkly" and can only "know in part, and prophesy in part"; to believe that we had the right, not simply to fight perceived error through teaching and persuasion, but also to curtail and deny the freedom and liberties of those whose experience and perceptions differed from our own.
I realize, of course, that you - as a professor and educator - would never personally participate in the suppression of the rights and freedoms of those whom you regard as deluded on these matters, and would rather seek to turn them from the error of their ways by persuasion and education.
But it seems to me that some of your more zealous colleagues and disciples may be less tolerant and prudent than yourself. For example, does not Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) display disturbing signs of the inquisitorial temperament that would deny freedom of conscience and expression to those whose positions cannot be scientifically tested and validated?A modern Inquisition conducted in the name of science to root out what you call "the mind virus of religion" would naturally have access to much more subtle and sophisticated technologies than were available to us. Whereas we employed fire (literally), you have access to firewalls and anti-virus software that conceivably could relegate most correspondence and written communications infected with the God virus to the cultural trash bin. I worry, however, that, once unleashed, the Inquisitional temperament will go too far and end up discrediting the very truths and institutions it purports to defend.
And when you suggest "maybe some children need to be protected from [religious] indoctrination by their own parents," I worry you may be straying down the same authoritarian path we once trod.
In Canada, for example, where you are lecturing this week, the most spiritual members of the population are aboriginal peoples. Many profess to believe something "spiritual" resides not only in every human, but also in animals, rocks, and trees - by your lights, an unscientific notion.
****(Quote of this blogpost; insertion by blogger Easy Nash:"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).)****
But to suggest their children should be taken away from them and re-educated in some sort of scientific residential schools would be to make a grievous mistake - exactly the same mistake we once made.
I conclude by suggesting that the proponents of faith and the proponents of science should agree on at least one vital point: The rights of human beings to freedom of conscience and expression should never again nor in the future be abrogated in the name of either faith or science. Do you agree?
Yours respectfully,
Robert Bellarmine
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine(1542-1621) became a cardinalof the Roman Catholic Church in 1599 and an archbishop in 1602.
Preston Manning is presidentand CEO of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
201)Preston Manning pretends to be a Roman Catholic Cardinal writing a letter to Richard Dawkins; Atheists, the new Spanish Inquisitioners?
OPEN LETTER: TO PROF. RICHARD DAWKINS
An Inquisition in science's name
Preston Manning imagines what one 17th-century cardinal would tell an eminent atheist
PRESTON MANNING
June 20, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper
Dear Prof. Dawkins:
I am writing to you as one who was once as convinced as you are that I understood the nature of reality and how it was best interpreted. Like you, I also regarded those who embraced alternative conceptions of reality as dangerously deluded, and did everything in my power to prevent their further propagation.
Unfortunately, in pursuing this course of action, my colleagues and I made a grievous mistake - a mistake that, in the end, seriously discredited ourselves, our conception of reality and the organizations through which we advanced and defended it.
I am writing this letter in the sincere hope of dissuading you, the author of The God Delusion, and your colleagues - scientists and atheists, as I believe you describe yourselves - from repeating our mistake and thereby inadvertently discrediting the methods and institutions of science.
My name is Robert Bellarmine. I was born in Tuscany in 1542 and joined the Jesuit order in 1560. Like you, I became a professor at a leading university. I specialized in theology, then considered "the queen of sciences," much like biology is becoming the queen of sciences in your century. Eventually I was summoned to Rome by the Pope and made a cardinal and archbishop.
The conception of reality to which I, along with the most highly educated people of our time, subscribed was that revealed by faith and scripture as interpreted by the Holy Catholic Church.We regarded our definition and interpretation of truth as a sacred trust that we were obliged to promote and defend. But notwithstanding our control of higher education, our authority was increasingly challenged by those who claimed there were alternative routes to truth.
Like you, we at first regarded the proponents of these views as deluded and sought to counteract their influence by teaching and persuasion. It was at this point, however, we made our great mistake.
When these delusions continued to spread in number and variety, we felt obliged to take harsher measures. We labelled the deviants "heretics." We established the Office of the Inquisition to hunt them down and expose the fraudulence of their claims, and to sentence them to the most extreme penalties if they refused to recant. We burned their books and then we burned the heretics themselves.
With the passage of time, we no longer confined our pursuit of heresy to the obviously ignorant and deluded. We extended it far and wide - I myself even became involved in the trial for heresy of the eminent astronomer Galileo Galilei.
What was our great mistake? It was to assume that we the church had an absolute monopoly on how truth was to be defined, discovered, and interpreted; to ignore the teaching of the great apostle of our own faith that at best, "we see through a glass darkly" and can only "know in part, and prophesy in part"; to believe that we had the right, not simply to fight perceived error through teaching and persuasion, but also to curtail and deny the freedom and liberties of those whose experience and perceptions differed from our own.
I realize, of course, that you - as a professor and educator - would never personally participate in the suppression of the rights and freedoms of those whom you regard as deluded on these matters, and would rather seek to turn them from the error of their ways by persuasion and education.
But it seems to me that some of your more zealous colleagues and disciples may be less tolerant and prudent than yourself. For example, does not Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) display disturbing signs of the inquisitorial temperament that would deny freedom of conscience and expression to those whose positions cannot be scientifically tested and validated?A modern Inquisition conducted in the name of science to root out what you call "the mind virus of religion" would naturally have access to much more subtle and sophisticated technologies than were available to us. Whereas we employed fire (literally), you have access to firewalls and anti-virus software that conceivably could relegate most correspondence and written communications infected with the God virus to the cultural trash bin. I worry, however, that, once unleashed, the Inquisitional temperament will go too far and end up discrediting the very truths and institutions it purports to defend.
And when you suggest "maybe some children need to be protected from [religious] indoctrination by their own parents," I worry you may be straying down the same authoritarian path we once trod.
In Canada, for example, where you are lecturing this week, the most spiritual members of the population are aboriginal peoples. Many profess to believe something "spiritual" resides not only in every human, but also in animals, rocks, and trees - by your lights, an unscientific notion.
****(Quote of this blogpost; insertion by blogger Easy Nash:"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).)****
But to suggest their children should be taken away from them and re-educated in some sort of scientific residential schools would be to make a grievous mistake - exactly the same mistake we once made.
I conclude by suggesting that the proponents of faith and the proponents of science should agree on at least one vital point: The rights of human beings to freedom of conscience and expression should never again nor in the future be abrogated in the name of either faith or science. Do you agree?
Yours respectfully,
Robert Bellarmine
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine(1542-1621) became a cardinalof the Roman Catholic Church in 1599 and an archbishop in 1602.
Preston Manning is presidentand CEO of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
319)"The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world...."; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
This post is now part of the following collection of posts:
454)A Collection of Posts on Symmetry in Nature, as a Product of the Human Mind, Geometry and Harmonious Mathematical Reasoning; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/454a-collection-of-posts-on-symmetry-in.html
"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy" (Aga Khan IV, IIS Convocation, October 2003, London, U.K.)
204)The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world....
Institute of Ismaili Studies
“The Mutual influence of Learning and the Development of Mathematical Thinking in the Arab Civilisation during 900-1200 AD”
Professor Afzal Ahmed
Oslo, Norway
May 2001
Abstract
International comparative studies of school mathematics as manifested in the latest Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston College, 2001) has dictated educational discourse by politicians, educators and policy makers in many countries. The results of these studies, which rely heavily on tests, have often been regarded as a proof of the achievement of students as well as the quality of the curriculum.
This heightens the danger of increasingly regarding mathematics as an objective discipline with indisputable truths independent of learners and teachers. In other words, mathematics in contrast to Popper, Kuhn and others’ view of science, is independent of context, value systems and beliefs.
In my presentation I will focus on how we can review the nature of mathematics as well as the process of teaching, learning and testing in order to help future generation to enhance their capacity for making judgements on increasingly complex issues which will form an integral part of their lives. I will mainly draw on the period 900-1200 CE, the period chosen as the focus of the conference. This was a vibrant period in the Arab civilisation for preserving, enhancing and communicating knowledge. It was a period when Muslims worked side by side with non-Muslims on works of philosophy, medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, geography, etc. At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.
The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
454)A Collection of Posts on Symmetry in Nature, as a Product of the Human Mind, Geometry and Harmonious Mathematical Reasoning; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/454a-collection-of-posts-on-symmetry-in.html
"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy" (Aga Khan IV, IIS Convocation, October 2003, London, U.K.)
204)The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world....
Institute of Ismaili Studies
“The Mutual influence of Learning and the Development of Mathematical Thinking in the Arab Civilisation during 900-1200 AD”
Professor Afzal Ahmed
Oslo, Norway
May 2001
Abstract
International comparative studies of school mathematics as manifested in the latest Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston College, 2001) has dictated educational discourse by politicians, educators and policy makers in many countries. The results of these studies, which rely heavily on tests, have often been regarded as a proof of the achievement of students as well as the quality of the curriculum.
This heightens the danger of increasingly regarding mathematics as an objective discipline with indisputable truths independent of learners and teachers. In other words, mathematics in contrast to Popper, Kuhn and others’ view of science, is independent of context, value systems and beliefs.
In my presentation I will focus on how we can review the nature of mathematics as well as the process of teaching, learning and testing in order to help future generation to enhance their capacity for making judgements on increasingly complex issues which will form an integral part of their lives. I will mainly draw on the period 900-1200 CE, the period chosen as the focus of the conference. This was a vibrant period in the Arab civilisation for preserving, enhancing and communicating knowledge. It was a period when Muslims worked side by side with non-Muslims on works of philosophy, medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, geography, etc. At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.
The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Monday, January 28, 2008
318)Massive supernova explosion: Source of chemical elements that make up all else in the universe, including living systems; Quotes of Aga Khans.
"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order"(Aga Khan III, 4th April 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)
"The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......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)
175)Massive supernova explosion: the source of chemical elements that make up everything else in the universe, including living systems.
Astronomers Astonished by 'Monstrous' Star Explosion
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 07 May 2007 02:04 pm
Scientists have detected a stellar explosion that is the brightest and most energetic ever recorded, and which could be the first evidence of a new type of supernova fueled by an antimatter engine.
The "SN 2006gy" explosion occurred in a galaxy 240 million light-years away, called NGC 1260, and was 100 times more energetic than typical supernovas. It was detected in September 2006 using ground-based telescopes and NASA's Chandra X-ray space observatory. It brightened slowly for 70 days, and at its peak emitted more than 50 billion Suns worth of light-shining 10 times brighter than its host galaxy-before dimming slowly. Most supernovas reach peak brightness in days to a few weeks.
"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, who led ground-based observations of the supernova at Lick Observatory in California and Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "We were astonished to see how bright it got and how long it lasted."
NASA has released an image and animation of what the explosion might have looked like.
The finding, presented today at a NASA press conference and detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal, provides evidence for a fundamentally different type of supernova explosion that only occurs with the universe's most massive stars.
The monster supernova suggests the first stars that illuminated the universe died in explosive lightshows. "We may have witnessed a modern-day version of how the first generation of the most massive stars ended their lives," Filippenko said.
Astrophysicists also think the supernova could be a preview of what they will see when a massive star in our own galaxy explodes.
Going out with a bang
Supernovas are stellar swan songs. They occur when ancient, massive stars do as poet Dylan Thomas advised, that is, to "burn and rage at the close of day," and "rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Most supernovas are the result of stars with 8 to 20 times the mass of our Sun collapsing under their own gravity. Astronomers think something different happened with SN 2006gy, whose star was much bigger--about 150 solar masses.
Stars this massive are extremely rare: Scientists estimate there are only a dozen or so such stars in the Milky Way's stellar population of 400 billion.
Supermassive stars are thought to produce so much gamma-ray light at the end of their lives that some of the radiation is converted into matter and antimatter, mostly electrons and positrons. Antimatter particles have the same mass as ordinary matter but opposite atomic properties such as spin and charge. Gamma radiation is the energy that prevents the outer layers of a star from collapsing; once it starts disappearing, the star's outer layer falls inward, triggering a thermonuclear explosion that destroys the star.
The new findings suggest some of the first stars in the early universe, which were also very massive, went out in spectacular explosions like SN 2006gy, instead of bypassing the supernova stage and collapsing directly into black holes.
"In terms of the effect on the early universe, there's a huge difference between these two possibilities," said study leader Nathan Smith, also of UC Berkeley. "One pollutes the galaxy with large quantities of newly made elements, and the other locks them up forever in a black hole."
Eta Carinae
Scientists think SN 2006gy could be a sign of things to come in our own galaxy. Eta Carinae, the most luminous star in our Milky Way, is located some 7,000 light-years away and seems poised to undergo its own explosion at any moment.
"This could happen tomorrow or it could happen 1,000 years from now," said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research.
Eta Carinae is an unstable star currently radiating about 5 million times more energy than our Sun and is undergoing eruptions on its surface that are similar to what scientists think happened on the star that produced SN 2006gy just before it blew.
Despite its relatively close proximity to us, Eta Carinae's death is not likely to pose any significant threat to life on Earth, scientists say.
"I think we can sleep quietly tonight for Eta Car not extinguishing life on Earth," Livio said, "but [SN 2006gy] and all the questions it brings about will keep us awake for quite a while."
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Saturday, January 26, 2008
317)So how old is the Universe anyway, 6000 years or 14 billion(14,000,000,000) years old?; Quotes of Aga Khan IV.
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's Magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, 1993, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: “My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.”(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
193)So how old is the Universe anyway, 6000 years or 14 billion(14,000,000,000) years old?
The recent opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, U.S.A. represents the efforts by biblical creationists to promulgate a purely literal exposition of the Genesis passages in the Bible, where the Universe was created in 6 days and is only about 6000 years old:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/315creation-museum-pooh-poohs-500-years.html
As a result of the discovery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the phenomenon of radioactivity among many elements in Nature, along with other advances, it has been possible to accurately assess the age of many objects in the Universe. Because the radioactive decay of an element is such a precise mathematical process, the most accurate time clocks used in the world today are radioactive atomic time clocks.
Using the decay of radioactive elements as well as other independent techniques, the Universe has been determined to be approximately 14 billion years old, as this paper outlines:
Age of the Universe
There are at least 3 ways that the age of the Universe can be estimated:
1)The age of the chemical elements.
2)The age of the oldest star clusters
3)The age of the oldest white dwarf stars.
Metric note: 1 Gyr=1 Gigayear=1 billion years
The age of the Universe can also be estimated from a cosmological model based on the Hubble constant and the densities of matter and dark energy. This model-based age is currently 13.7 +/- 0.2 Gyr. But this Web page will only deal with actual age measurements, not estimates from cosmological models. The actual age measurements are consistent with the model-based age which increases our confidence in the Big Bang model.
1)The Age of the Elements
The age of the chemical elements can be estimated using radioactive decay to determine how old a given mixture of atoms is. The most definite ages that can be determined this way are ages since the solidification of rock samples. When a rock solidifies, the chemical elements often get separated into different crystalline grains in the rock. For example, sodium and calcium are both common elements, but their chemical behaviours are quite different, so one usually finds sodium and calcium in different grains in a differentiated rock. Rubidium and strontium are heavier elements that behave chemically much like sodium and calcium. Thus rubidium and strontium are usually found in different grains in a rock. But Rb-87 decays into Sr-87 with a half-life of 47 billion years. And there is another isotope of strontium, Sr-86, which is not produced by any rubidium decay. The isotope Sr-87 is called radiogenic, because it can be produced by radioactive decay, while Sr-86 is non-radiogenic. The Sr-86 is used to determine what fraction of the Sr-87 was produced by radioactive decay. This is done by plotting the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio versus the Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio. When a rock is first formed, the different grains have a wide range of Rb-87/Sr-86 ratios, but the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio is the same in all grains because the chemical processes leading to differentiated grains do not separate isotopes. After the rock has been solid for several billion years, a fraction of the Rb-87 will have decayed into Sr-87. Then the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio will be larger in grains with a large Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio.
Do a linear fit of
Sr-87/Sr-86 = a + b*(Rb-87/Sr-86)
and then the slope term is given by b = 2x - 1
with x being the number of half-lives that the rock has been solid. See the talk.origins isochrone FAQ for more on radioactive dating.
When applied to rocks on the surface of the Earth, the oldest rocks are about 3.8 billion years old. When applied to meteorites, the oldest are 4.56 billion years old. This very well determined age is the age of the Solar System. See the talk.origins age of the Earth FAQ for more on the age of the solar system.
When applied to a mixed together and evolving system like the gas in the Milky Way, no great precision is possible. One problem is that there is no chemical separation into grains of different crystals, so the absolute values of the isotope ratios have to be used instead of the slopes of a linear fit. This requires that we know precisely how much of each isotope was originally present, so an accurate model for element production is needed. One isotope pair that has been used is rhenium and osmium: in particular Re-187 which decays into Os-187 with a half-life of 40 billion years. It looks like 15% of the original Re-187 has decayed, which leads to an age of 8-11 billion years. But this is just the mean formation age of the stuff in the Solar System, and no rhenium or osmium has been made for the last 4.56 billion years. Thus to use this age to determine the age of the Universe, a model of when the elements were made is needed. If all the elements were made in a burst soon after the Big Bang, then the age of the Universe would be to = 8-11 billion years. But if the elements are made continuously at a constant rate, then the mean age of stuff in the Solar System is
(to + tSS)/2 = 8-11 Gyr
which we can solve for the age of the Universe giving to = 11.5-17.5 Gyr
238U and 232Th are both radioactive with half-lives of 4.468 and 14.05 Gyrs, but the uranium is underabundant in the Solar System compared to the expected production ratio in supernovae. This is not surprising since the 238U has a shorter half-life, and the magnitude of the difference gives an estimate for the age of the Universe. Dauphas (2005, Nature, 435, 1203) combines the Solar System 238U:232Th ratio with the ratio observed in very old, metal poor stars to solve simultaneous equations for both the production ratio and the age of the Universe, obtaining 14.5+2.8-2.2 Gyr.
Radioactive Dating of an Old Star
A very interesting paper by Cowan et al. (1997, ApJ, 480, 246) discusses the thorium abundance in an old halo star. Normally it is not possible to measure the abundance of radioactive isotopes in other stars because the lines are too weak. But in CS 22892-052 the thorium lines can be seen because the iron lines are very weak. The Th/Eu (Europium) ratio in this star is 0.219 compared to 0.369 in the Solar System now. Thorium decays with a half-life of 14.05 Gyr, so the Solar System formed with Th/Eu = 24.6/14.05*0.369 = 0.463. If CS 22892-052 formed with the same Th/Eu ratio it is then 15.2 +/- 3.5 Gyr old. It is actually probably slightly older because some of the thorium that would have gone into the Solar System decayed before the Sun formed, and this correction depends on the nucleosynthesis history of the Milky Way. Nonetheless, this is still an interesting measure of the age of the oldest stars that is independent of the main-sequence lifetime method.
A later paper by Cowan et al. (1999, ApJ, 521, 194) gives 15.6 +/- 4.6 Gyr for the age based on two stars: CS 22892-052 and HD 115444.
A another star, CS 31082-001, shows an age of 12.5 +/- 3 Gyr based on the decay of U-238 [Cayrel, et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 691-692]. Wanajo et al. refine the predicted U/Th production ratio and get 14.1 +/- 2.5 Gyr for the age of this star.
2)The Age of the Oldest Star Clusters
When stars are burning hydrogen to helium in their cores, they fall on a single curve in the luminosity-temperature plot known as the H-R diagram after its inventors, Hertzsprung and Russell. This track is known as the main sequence, since most stars are found there. Since the luminosity of a star varies like M3 or M4, the lifetime of a star on the main sequence varies like t=const*M/L=k/L0.7. Thus if you measure the luminosity of the most luminous star on the main sequence, you get an upper limit for the age of the cluster:
Age < onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9509115" target="_blank">Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan and Krauss (1996, Science, 271, 957) apply this technique to globular clusters and find that the age of the Universe is greater than 12.07 Gyr with 95% confidence. They say the age is proportional to one over the luminosity of the RR Lyra stars which are used to determine the distances to globular clusters. Chaboyer (1997) gives a best estimate of 14.6 +/- 1.7 Gyr for the age of the globular clusters. But recent Hipparcos results show that the globular clusters are further away than previously thought, so their stars are more luminous. Gratton et al. give ages between 8.5 and 13.3 Gyr with 12.1 being most likely, while Reid gives ages between 11 and 13 Gyr, and Chaboyer et al. give 11.5 +/- 1.3 Gyr for the mean age of the oldest globular clusters.
3)The Age of the Oldest White Dwarfs
A white dwarf star is an object that is about as heavy as the Sun but only the radius of the Earth. The average density of a white dwarf is a million times denser than water. White dwarf stars form in the centers of red giant stars, but are not visible until the envelope of the red giant is ejected into space. When this happens the ultraviolet radiation from the very hot stellar core ionizes the gas and produces a planetary nebula. The envelope of the star continues to move away from the central core, and eventually the planetary nebula fades to invisibility, leaving just the very hot core which is now a white dwarf. White dwarf stars glow just from residual heat. The oldest white dwarfs will be the coldest and thus the faintest. By searching for faint white dwarfs, one can estimate the length of time the oldest white dwarfs have been cooling. Oswalt, Smith, Wood and Hintzen (1996, Nature, 382, 692) have done this and get an age of 9.5+1.1-0.8 Gyr for the disk of the Milky Way. They estimate an age of the Universe which is at least 2 Gyr older than the disk, so to > 11.5 Gyr.
Hansen et al. have used the HST to measure the ages of white dwarfs in the globular cluster M4, obtaining 12.7 +/- 0.7 Gyr. In 2004 Hansen et al. updated their analysis to give an age for M4 of 12.1 +/- 0.9 Gyr, which is very consistent with the age of globular clusters from the main sequence turnoff. Allowing allowing for the time between the Big Bang and the formation of globular clusters (and its uncertainty) implies an age for the Universe of 12.8 +/- 1.1 Gyr.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
"To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: “My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.”(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
193)So how old is the Universe anyway, 6000 years or 14 billion(14,000,000,000) years old?
The recent opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, U.S.A. represents the efforts by biblical creationists to promulgate a purely literal exposition of the Genesis passages in the Bible, where the Universe was created in 6 days and is only about 6000 years old:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/315creation-museum-pooh-poohs-500-years.html
As a result of the discovery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the phenomenon of radioactivity among many elements in Nature, along with other advances, it has been possible to accurately assess the age of many objects in the Universe. Because the radioactive decay of an element is such a precise mathematical process, the most accurate time clocks used in the world today are radioactive atomic time clocks.
Using the decay of radioactive elements as well as other independent techniques, the Universe has been determined to be approximately 14 billion years old, as this paper outlines:
Age of the Universe
There are at least 3 ways that the age of the Universe can be estimated:
1)The age of the chemical elements.
2)The age of the oldest star clusters
3)The age of the oldest white dwarf stars.
Metric note: 1 Gyr=1 Gigayear=1 billion years
The age of the Universe can also be estimated from a cosmological model based on the Hubble constant and the densities of matter and dark energy. This model-based age is currently 13.7 +/- 0.2 Gyr. But this Web page will only deal with actual age measurements, not estimates from cosmological models. The actual age measurements are consistent with the model-based age which increases our confidence in the Big Bang model.
1)The Age of the Elements
The age of the chemical elements can be estimated using radioactive decay to determine how old a given mixture of atoms is. The most definite ages that can be determined this way are ages since the solidification of rock samples. When a rock solidifies, the chemical elements often get separated into different crystalline grains in the rock. For example, sodium and calcium are both common elements, but their chemical behaviours are quite different, so one usually finds sodium and calcium in different grains in a differentiated rock. Rubidium and strontium are heavier elements that behave chemically much like sodium and calcium. Thus rubidium and strontium are usually found in different grains in a rock. But Rb-87 decays into Sr-87 with a half-life of 47 billion years. And there is another isotope of strontium, Sr-86, which is not produced by any rubidium decay. The isotope Sr-87 is called radiogenic, because it can be produced by radioactive decay, while Sr-86 is non-radiogenic. The Sr-86 is used to determine what fraction of the Sr-87 was produced by radioactive decay. This is done by plotting the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio versus the Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio. When a rock is first formed, the different grains have a wide range of Rb-87/Sr-86 ratios, but the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio is the same in all grains because the chemical processes leading to differentiated grains do not separate isotopes. After the rock has been solid for several billion years, a fraction of the Rb-87 will have decayed into Sr-87. Then the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio will be larger in grains with a large Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio.
Do a linear fit of
Sr-87/Sr-86 = a + b*(Rb-87/Sr-86)
and then the slope term is given by b = 2x - 1
with x being the number of half-lives that the rock has been solid. See the talk.origins isochrone FAQ for more on radioactive dating.
When applied to rocks on the surface of the Earth, the oldest rocks are about 3.8 billion years old. When applied to meteorites, the oldest are 4.56 billion years old. This very well determined age is the age of the Solar System. See the talk.origins age of the Earth FAQ for more on the age of the solar system.
When applied to a mixed together and evolving system like the gas in the Milky Way, no great precision is possible. One problem is that there is no chemical separation into grains of different crystals, so the absolute values of the isotope ratios have to be used instead of the slopes of a linear fit. This requires that we know precisely how much of each isotope was originally present, so an accurate model for element production is needed. One isotope pair that has been used is rhenium and osmium: in particular Re-187 which decays into Os-187 with a half-life of 40 billion years. It looks like 15% of the original Re-187 has decayed, which leads to an age of 8-11 billion years. But this is just the mean formation age of the stuff in the Solar System, and no rhenium or osmium has been made for the last 4.56 billion years. Thus to use this age to determine the age of the Universe, a model of when the elements were made is needed. If all the elements were made in a burst soon after the Big Bang, then the age of the Universe would be to = 8-11 billion years. But if the elements are made continuously at a constant rate, then the mean age of stuff in the Solar System is
(to + tSS)/2 = 8-11 Gyr
which we can solve for the age of the Universe giving to = 11.5-17.5 Gyr
238U and 232Th are both radioactive with half-lives of 4.468 and 14.05 Gyrs, but the uranium is underabundant in the Solar System compared to the expected production ratio in supernovae. This is not surprising since the 238U has a shorter half-life, and the magnitude of the difference gives an estimate for the age of the Universe. Dauphas (2005, Nature, 435, 1203) combines the Solar System 238U:232Th ratio with the ratio observed in very old, metal poor stars to solve simultaneous equations for both the production ratio and the age of the Universe, obtaining 14.5+2.8-2.2 Gyr.
Radioactive Dating of an Old Star
A very interesting paper by Cowan et al. (1997, ApJ, 480, 246) discusses the thorium abundance in an old halo star. Normally it is not possible to measure the abundance of radioactive isotopes in other stars because the lines are too weak. But in CS 22892-052 the thorium lines can be seen because the iron lines are very weak. The Th/Eu (Europium) ratio in this star is 0.219 compared to 0.369 in the Solar System now. Thorium decays with a half-life of 14.05 Gyr, so the Solar System formed with Th/Eu = 24.6/14.05*0.369 = 0.463. If CS 22892-052 formed with the same Th/Eu ratio it is then 15.2 +/- 3.5 Gyr old. It is actually probably slightly older because some of the thorium that would have gone into the Solar System decayed before the Sun formed, and this correction depends on the nucleosynthesis history of the Milky Way. Nonetheless, this is still an interesting measure of the age of the oldest stars that is independent of the main-sequence lifetime method.
A later paper by Cowan et al. (1999, ApJ, 521, 194) gives 15.6 +/- 4.6 Gyr for the age based on two stars: CS 22892-052 and HD 115444.
A another star, CS 31082-001, shows an age of 12.5 +/- 3 Gyr based on the decay of U-238 [Cayrel, et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 691-692]. Wanajo et al. refine the predicted U/Th production ratio and get 14.1 +/- 2.5 Gyr for the age of this star.
2)The Age of the Oldest Star Clusters
When stars are burning hydrogen to helium in their cores, they fall on a single curve in the luminosity-temperature plot known as the H-R diagram after its inventors, Hertzsprung and Russell. This track is known as the main sequence, since most stars are found there. Since the luminosity of a star varies like M3 or M4, the lifetime of a star on the main sequence varies like t=const*M/L=k/L0.7. Thus if you measure the luminosity of the most luminous star on the main sequence, you get an upper limit for the age of the cluster:
Age < onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9509115" target="_blank">Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan and Krauss (1996, Science, 271, 957) apply this technique to globular clusters and find that the age of the Universe is greater than 12.07 Gyr with 95% confidence. They say the age is proportional to one over the luminosity of the RR Lyra stars which are used to determine the distances to globular clusters. Chaboyer (1997) gives a best estimate of 14.6 +/- 1.7 Gyr for the age of the globular clusters. But recent Hipparcos results show that the globular clusters are further away than previously thought, so their stars are more luminous. Gratton et al. give ages between 8.5 and 13.3 Gyr with 12.1 being most likely, while Reid gives ages between 11 and 13 Gyr, and Chaboyer et al. give 11.5 +/- 1.3 Gyr for the mean age of the oldest globular clusters.
3)The Age of the Oldest White Dwarfs
A white dwarf star is an object that is about as heavy as the Sun but only the radius of the Earth. The average density of a white dwarf is a million times denser than water. White dwarf stars form in the centers of red giant stars, but are not visible until the envelope of the red giant is ejected into space. When this happens the ultraviolet radiation from the very hot stellar core ionizes the gas and produces a planetary nebula. The envelope of the star continues to move away from the central core, and eventually the planetary nebula fades to invisibility, leaving just the very hot core which is now a white dwarf. White dwarf stars glow just from residual heat. The oldest white dwarfs will be the coldest and thus the faintest. By searching for faint white dwarfs, one can estimate the length of time the oldest white dwarfs have been cooling. Oswalt, Smith, Wood and Hintzen (1996, Nature, 382, 692) have done this and get an age of 9.5+1.1-0.8 Gyr for the disk of the Milky Way. They estimate an age of the Universe which is at least 2 Gyr older than the disk, so to > 11.5 Gyr.
Hansen et al. have used the HST to measure the ages of white dwarfs in the globular cluster M4, obtaining 12.7 +/- 0.7 Gyr. In 2004 Hansen et al. updated their analysis to give an age for M4 of 12.1 +/- 0.9 Gyr, which is very consistent with the age of globular clusters from the main sequence turnoff. Allowing allowing for the time between the Big Bang and the formation of globular clusters (and its uncertainty) implies an age for the Universe of 12.8 +/- 1.1 Gyr.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
316)The debate rages on: Evolutionism versus Creationism; The upright truth about humans; Quote of Aga Khan IV.
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's Magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, 1993, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
183)The debate rages on:Evolutionism versus Creationism; The upright truth about humans.
I suppose this article that appeared in today's Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, could be seen as a response to the recent announcement of the opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, U.S.A., and about which I blogged here:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/315creation-museum-pooh-poohs-500-years.html
The upright truth about humans
We never walked on four feet - and neither do orangutans
ANNE MCILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER
June 1, 2007
We were never knuckle draggers.
Early humans didn't start out walking on all fours like gorillas and then slowly straighten up, a team of British researchers says. Instead, our ancestors became two-footed while nimbly traversing tree branches in search of fruit. When ancient rain forests began to thin out, they jumped down from the trees and starting walking on the ground.
"They stayed doing what they were doing in the first place," says Robin Crompton, with the department of human anatomy and cell biology at the University of Liverpool.
His work, published in today's edition of the journal Science, is based on the fossil record and observations of orangutans. It challenges the widely held notion that upright walking is uniquely human, something that distinguishes us from our closest relatives, the great apes.
Orangutans do it all the time, Dr. Crompton says. They navigate skinny branches on two feet, grabbling higher branches with their hands to help with their balance. They can also walk two-footed on the ground.
The paper in Science not only challenges the conventional wisdom that humans evolved from a four-footed terrestrial ancestor, it puts forward the simplest explanation yet for why we put one foot in front of the other.
Early humans didn't start walking upright so they could wade into water to find food, more easily carry their babies or travel more quickly and efficiently on the savannah, Dr. Crompton says, dismissing competing theories about the evolution of bipedalism.
Instead, they learned how to walk in trees, and eventually did the same on the ground."Bipedalism is nothing new. It is not the dramatic change that people portray it as," he says.He has long been skeptical of the theory that humans originally walked like gorillas, and over time came to use two feet and stand upright.
Studying orangutans offered a chance to gather evidence for an alternative explanation. His colleague, Susannah Thorpe at the University of Birmingham, spend a year in the Sumatran rain forest recording almost every move the orangutans made.
The team concluded that two-footed walking helps orangutans survive because it allows them better access to fruit.
They argue than ancient apes - including our ancestors - probably did the same thing, and that upright walking offered an advantage once they climbed down from the trees.
Starting about 24 million years ago, the rain forests in East and Central Africa dwindled and became patchy. Apes that had spent almost their entire lives in the forest canopy had to walk from tree to tree.
Early human ancestors probably spent more time feeding on the forest floor, the researchers say. Compared to balancing on a springy branch, walking on the ground would have been easy.The ancestors of chimps and gorillas, on the other hand, became more specialized at going up and down trees - holding on with both their hands and feet. They kept that same posture on the ground, which is why they often knuckle-walk, supporting their weight with their hands as well as their feet.
Paul O'Higgins, a researcher at the University of York in Britain, says the paper offers "compelling new evidence" that two-footed walking is more ancient than scientists ever imagined.
Not only can orangutans do it, but a number of fossils suggest that ancient apes were walking on two feet long before humans evolved.
These fossils show evidence of upright posture and bipedalism, Dr. O'Higgins says, but scientists weren't sure what to make of them.
The new research offers an explanation: ancient apes could walk upright.
But it also complicates the work of paleontologists, who have used evidence of two-footed walking as a key criterion for distinguishing early human (or hominin) fossils from those of other apes.
"It turns it all on its head, and reopens the debate," he says. "The key question is; how do we recognize our own ancestors?"
We may have always walked upright
A team of scientists says our ancestors may have always walked upright, but in trees, much like orangutans do. Early humans were able to transfer that skill to the ground. But the ancestors of gorillas and chimps stayed in trees longer, which is why their descendants use their hands and feet when walking.
Shared ancestor
This large ancestral ape was capable of hand-assisted, arboreal bipedalism with extended lower limbs.
Orangutans
hand-assisted bipedalism allows movement on slender, springy branches for easier crossings between trees.
Gorillas
and chimps, in response to changing habitats, moved in and out of trees, independently acquiring knuckle walking.
Chimpanzees
The bent-hip, bent-knee bipedal posture accomodates the physical demands of vertical climbing.
Hominins
retained the adaptations for extended-limb bipedalism and eventually became committed to walking on the ground.
SOURCE: SCIENCE MAGAZINE
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
183)The debate rages on:Evolutionism versus Creationism; The upright truth about humans.
I suppose this article that appeared in today's Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, could be seen as a response to the recent announcement of the opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, U.S.A., and about which I blogged here:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/315creation-museum-pooh-poohs-500-years.html
The upright truth about humans
We never walked on four feet - and neither do orangutans
ANNE MCILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER
June 1, 2007
We were never knuckle draggers.
Early humans didn't start out walking on all fours like gorillas and then slowly straighten up, a team of British researchers says. Instead, our ancestors became two-footed while nimbly traversing tree branches in search of fruit. When ancient rain forests began to thin out, they jumped down from the trees and starting walking on the ground.
"They stayed doing what they were doing in the first place," says Robin Crompton, with the department of human anatomy and cell biology at the University of Liverpool.
His work, published in today's edition of the journal Science, is based on the fossil record and observations of orangutans. It challenges the widely held notion that upright walking is uniquely human, something that distinguishes us from our closest relatives, the great apes.
Orangutans do it all the time, Dr. Crompton says. They navigate skinny branches on two feet, grabbling higher branches with their hands to help with their balance. They can also walk two-footed on the ground.
The paper in Science not only challenges the conventional wisdom that humans evolved from a four-footed terrestrial ancestor, it puts forward the simplest explanation yet for why we put one foot in front of the other.
Early humans didn't start walking upright so they could wade into water to find food, more easily carry their babies or travel more quickly and efficiently on the savannah, Dr. Crompton says, dismissing competing theories about the evolution of bipedalism.
Instead, they learned how to walk in trees, and eventually did the same on the ground."Bipedalism is nothing new. It is not the dramatic change that people portray it as," he says.He has long been skeptical of the theory that humans originally walked like gorillas, and over time came to use two feet and stand upright.
Studying orangutans offered a chance to gather evidence for an alternative explanation. His colleague, Susannah Thorpe at the University of Birmingham, spend a year in the Sumatran rain forest recording almost every move the orangutans made.
The team concluded that two-footed walking helps orangutans survive because it allows them better access to fruit.
They argue than ancient apes - including our ancestors - probably did the same thing, and that upright walking offered an advantage once they climbed down from the trees.
Starting about 24 million years ago, the rain forests in East and Central Africa dwindled and became patchy. Apes that had spent almost their entire lives in the forest canopy had to walk from tree to tree.
Early human ancestors probably spent more time feeding on the forest floor, the researchers say. Compared to balancing on a springy branch, walking on the ground would have been easy.The ancestors of chimps and gorillas, on the other hand, became more specialized at going up and down trees - holding on with both their hands and feet. They kept that same posture on the ground, which is why they often knuckle-walk, supporting their weight with their hands as well as their feet.
Paul O'Higgins, a researcher at the University of York in Britain, says the paper offers "compelling new evidence" that two-footed walking is more ancient than scientists ever imagined.
Not only can orangutans do it, but a number of fossils suggest that ancient apes were walking on two feet long before humans evolved.
These fossils show evidence of upright posture and bipedalism, Dr. O'Higgins says, but scientists weren't sure what to make of them.
The new research offers an explanation: ancient apes could walk upright.
But it also complicates the work of paleontologists, who have used evidence of two-footed walking as a key criterion for distinguishing early human (or hominin) fossils from those of other apes.
"It turns it all on its head, and reopens the debate," he says. "The key question is; how do we recognize our own ancestors?"
We may have always walked upright
A team of scientists says our ancestors may have always walked upright, but in trees, much like orangutans do. Early humans were able to transfer that skill to the ground. But the ancestors of gorillas and chimps stayed in trees longer, which is why their descendants use their hands and feet when walking.
Shared ancestor
This large ancestral ape was capable of hand-assisted, arboreal bipedalism with extended lower limbs.
Orangutans
hand-assisted bipedalism allows movement on slender, springy branches for easier crossings between trees.
Gorillas
and chimps, in response to changing habitats, moved in and out of trees, independently acquiring knuckle walking.
Chimpanzees
The bent-hip, bent-knee bipedal posture accomodates the physical demands of vertical climbing.
Hominins
retained the adaptations for extended-limb bipedalism and eventually became committed to walking on the ground.
SOURCE: SCIENCE MAGAZINE
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
315)Creation Museum pooh-poohs 500 years of empirical scientific research in favour of unabashed literalism; Quotes of Aga Khan IV.
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's Magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, 1993, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"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, 11th November 1985, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: “My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.”(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
179)Creation Museum pooh-poohs five hundred years of empirical scientific research in favour of unabashed literalism; where have I heard this before?
Unrelenting literalism in Christianity and Islam: the former led to the Spanish Inquisition and untold suffering and misery for humanity 500 to 700 years ago; the latter threatens to do the same today unless it is vigorously contained and marginalised. The article below reflects literalism taken to its absurd limit in Christianity. One of the concepts it embodies is the creation of the universe in 6 days('Genesis'). I blogged about another interpretation of the significance of God creating the universe in 6 days here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/106symbolism-allegory-esoteric.html
The difference between this view as expounded by Shafique Virani and the one the new Creation Museum in Kentucky represents is like that between night and day, between the concrete and the symbolic, between the outer and inner aspects of religion, between the zahir and the batin to use terms germane to the Shia Ismaili Muslim tariqah:
Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs
by Edward Rothstein.
Published: May 24, 2007
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.
It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.
So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.
There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.
Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.
For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.
The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin’s theory — which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species but also cultures (which is why “primitive” cultures were long part of its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.
The Creation Museum has a similar interest in dramatizing origins, but sees natural history as divine history. And now that many museums have also become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old and was created in six days?
Mark Looy, a founder of Answers in Genesis with its president, Ken Ham, said the ministry expected perhaps 250,000 visitors during the museum’s first year. In preparation Mr. Ham for 13 years has been overseeing 350 seminars annually about the truths of Genesis, which have been drawing thousands of acolytes. The organization’s magazine has 50,000 subscribers. The museum also says that it has 9,000 charter members and international contributors who have left the institution free of debt.
But for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden’s dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but “to ‘talk’ to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.”
Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming offers “silent testimony to God’s worldwide judgment,” not because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished — somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah’s flood. Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.
The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.
The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.
Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.
But given the museum’s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?
In the museum’s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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 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, 11th November 1985, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: “My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.”(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
179)Creation Museum pooh-poohs five hundred years of empirical scientific research in favour of unabashed literalism; where have I heard this before?
Unrelenting literalism in Christianity and Islam: the former led to the Spanish Inquisition and untold suffering and misery for humanity 500 to 700 years ago; the latter threatens to do the same today unless it is vigorously contained and marginalised. The article below reflects literalism taken to its absurd limit in Christianity. One of the concepts it embodies is the creation of the universe in 6 days('Genesis'). I blogged about another interpretation of the significance of God creating the universe in 6 days here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/106symbolism-allegory-esoteric.html
The difference between this view as expounded by Shafique Virani and the one the new Creation Museum in Kentucky represents is like that between night and day, between the concrete and the symbolic, between the outer and inner aspects of religion, between the zahir and the batin to use terms germane to the Shia Ismaili Muslim tariqah:
Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs
by Edward Rothstein.
Published: May 24, 2007
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.
It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.
So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.
There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.
Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.
For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.
The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin’s theory — which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species but also cultures (which is why “primitive” cultures were long part of its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.
The Creation Museum has a similar interest in dramatizing origins, but sees natural history as divine history. And now that many museums have also become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old and was created in six days?
Mark Looy, a founder of Answers in Genesis with its president, Ken Ham, said the ministry expected perhaps 250,000 visitors during the museum’s first year. In preparation Mr. Ham for 13 years has been overseeing 350 seminars annually about the truths of Genesis, which have been drawing thousands of acolytes. The organization’s magazine has 50,000 subscribers. The museum also says that it has 9,000 charter members and international contributors who have left the institution free of debt.
But for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden’s dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but “to ‘talk’ to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.”
Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming offers “silent testimony to God’s worldwide judgment,” not because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished — somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah’s flood. Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.
The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.
The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.
Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.
But given the museum’s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?
In the museum’s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Thursday, January 24, 2008
314)Ayats(Signs) of Allah's Magnificence in the world of Astronomy, Collection from my old blog; Quotes from Noble Quran and the Aga Khans.
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 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].
“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, Charlottesville, Virginia, 13 April 1984)
The tapestry of Islamic history is studded with jewels of civilization; these jewels poured forth their light and beauty; great statesmen, great philosophers, great doctors, great astronomers; but these individuals, these precious stones were worked into a tapestry, whose dominant theme was Islam, and this theme remained dominant regardless of the swallowing up of foreign lands, foreign cultures, foreign languages and foreign people. (Aga Khan IV, 30 Jan 1970)
God has given us the miracle of life with all its attributes: the extraordinary manifestations of sunrise and sunset, of sickness and recovery, of birth and death, but surely if He has given us the means with which to remove ourselves from this world so as to go to other parts of the Universe, we can but accept as further manifestations the creation and destructions of stars, the birth and death of atomic particles, the flighting new sound and light waves. I am afraid that the torch of intellectual discovery, the attraction of the unknown, the desire for intellectual self-perfection have left us. (Aga Khan IV,Speech, 1963, Mindanao, Phillipines)
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).
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).
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).
Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God’s signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)
Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/basics-on-vast-distances-and-sizes-in.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/08/238another-remarkable-picture-by-nasa.htmlhttp://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/08/237now-is-time-to-go-outside-to-see.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/07/225relative-to-rest-of-cosmos-calling.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/07/212on-verge-of-discovery-of-elusive.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/06/193so-how-old-is-universe-anyway-6000.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/06/187a-young-mother-starsun-and-her-baby.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/06/186modern-day-astrosleuths-doing.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/06/185whats-new-in-world-of-astronomy.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/05/176.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/05/175massive-supernova-explosion-source.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/05/173how-scattering-of-light-by-other.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/169one-hour-of-contemplation-on-works.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/166out-of-about-200-planets-discovered.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/165the-roiling-rumbling-dynamic-sun.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/164orbiting-much-closer-to-smaller.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/161learning-more-geometry-from-maker-of.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/159through-scientific-and-other.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/151learning-geometry-from-maker-of.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/142magnificent-images-of-partial-solar.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/141bigger-and-better-telescopes-to.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/137the-bending-and-scattering-of-light.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/134pillars-of-creation-or-fingers-on.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/132vivacious-valentines-day-vista.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/128an-interview-with-neil-degrasse.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/123a-physics-experiment-with-prism-we.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/121medieval-castles-moon-and-lessons.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/120one-of-better-pictures-of-orion.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/118a-snapshot-of-matter-that-went-into.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/117astronomical-potpourri.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/115comet-mcnaughts-farewell-to-skies-in.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/113the-material-universe-as-part-of.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/110comet-mcnaught-over-catalonia-spain.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/109stellar-nurseries-in-cosmos.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/107a-comet-with-its-tail-made-of-ice.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/102big-dipper-and-little-dipper-in.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/99a-place-in-universe-where-new-heavens.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/97another-legacy-to-pantheon-of-world.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/93back-to-back-pictures-on-nasa-website.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/92three-scintillating-blue-supergiant.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/90do-not-unbelievers-see-that-heavens.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/cosmic-show-of-lights-on-december-13th.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/evidence-on-expanding-universe-and-its.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/al-nitak-al-nilam-mintaka-betelgeuse-al.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_2794.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/amazing-hubble-telescope.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/awesome-sun-and-its-tiny.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/storm-on-planet-jupiter-that-is-as.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/big-bang-theory-proof-2006-nobel-prize.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_6348.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/decision-by-international-astronomical.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_2172.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_8978.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_09.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/important-piece-of-information-about.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-golden-age-of-astronomy.html
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/astronomy-today.html
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
313)"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)
"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, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
159)"...through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation."
Einstein was right: space and time bend
Ninety years after he expounded his famous theory, a $700m Nasa probe has proved that the universe behaves as he said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works.
Anushka Asthana and David Smith
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Observer
Under his name in the Oxford English Dictionary is the simple definition: genius. Yet for decades physicists have been asking the question: did Albert Einstein get it wrong? After half a century, seven cancellations and $700m, a mission to test his theory about the universe has finally confirmed that the man was a mastermind - or at least half proved it.
The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa's most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday 'to a precision of better than 1 per cent' the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time.
But this - what is referred to as the 'geodetic' effect - is only half of the theory. The other, 'frame-dragging', stated that as the world spins it drags the fabric of the universe behind it.Francis Everitt, the Stanford University professor who has devoted his life to investigating Einstein's theory of relativity, told scientists at the American Physical Society it would be another eight months before he could measure the 'frame-dragging' effect precisely.
'Understanding the details is a bit like an archeological dig,' said William Bencze, programme manager for the mission. 'A scientist starts with a bulldozer, follows with a shovel, then finally uses dental picks and toothbrushes to clear the dust away. We're passing out the toothbrushes now.'
The Gravity Probe B project was conceived in the late 1950s but suffered decades of delays while other scientists ran tests corroborating Einstein's theory. It was Everitt's determination that stopped it being cancelled. The joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University uses four of the most perfect spheres - ultra precise gyroscopes - to detect minute distortions in the fabric of the universe. Everitt's aim was to prove to the highest precision yet if Einstein was correct in the way he described gravity.
According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought.
Few scientists need the final results, which will be revealed in December, to convince them of Einstein's genius. 'From the most esoteric aspects of time dilation through to the beautiful and simple equation, e=mc2, the vast bulk of Einstein's ideas about the universe are standing up to the test of time,' said Robert Massey, from the Royal Astronomical Society.
He said the mission was 'legitimate science' to test a theory and confirm its brilliance, but others have criticised the costs and length of the study, claiming that what was announced had already been shown. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said the announcement would 'fork no lightning'.
The theory explained
When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.
Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.
Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling.
According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. 'Frame dragging' theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body 'twists' nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein's theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
159)"...through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation."
Einstein was right: space and time bend
Ninety years after he expounded his famous theory, a $700m Nasa probe has proved that the universe behaves as he said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works.
Anushka Asthana and David Smith
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Observer
Under his name in the Oxford English Dictionary is the simple definition: genius. Yet for decades physicists have been asking the question: did Albert Einstein get it wrong? After half a century, seven cancellations and $700m, a mission to test his theory about the universe has finally confirmed that the man was a mastermind - or at least half proved it.
The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa's most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday 'to a precision of better than 1 per cent' the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time.
But this - what is referred to as the 'geodetic' effect - is only half of the theory. The other, 'frame-dragging', stated that as the world spins it drags the fabric of the universe behind it.Francis Everitt, the Stanford University professor who has devoted his life to investigating Einstein's theory of relativity, told scientists at the American Physical Society it would be another eight months before he could measure the 'frame-dragging' effect precisely.
'Understanding the details is a bit like an archeological dig,' said William Bencze, programme manager for the mission. 'A scientist starts with a bulldozer, follows with a shovel, then finally uses dental picks and toothbrushes to clear the dust away. We're passing out the toothbrushes now.'
The Gravity Probe B project was conceived in the late 1950s but suffered decades of delays while other scientists ran tests corroborating Einstein's theory. It was Everitt's determination that stopped it being cancelled. The joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University uses four of the most perfect spheres - ultra precise gyroscopes - to detect minute distortions in the fabric of the universe. Everitt's aim was to prove to the highest precision yet if Einstein was correct in the way he described gravity.
According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought.
Few scientists need the final results, which will be revealed in December, to convince them of Einstein's genius. 'From the most esoteric aspects of time dilation through to the beautiful and simple equation, e=mc2, the vast bulk of Einstein's ideas about the universe are standing up to the test of time,' said Robert Massey, from the Royal Astronomical Society.
He said the mission was 'legitimate science' to test a theory and confirm its brilliance, but others have criticised the costs and length of the study, claiming that what was announced had already been shown. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said the announcement would 'fork no lightning'.
The theory explained
When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.
Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.
Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling.
According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. 'Frame dragging' theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body 'twists' nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein's theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate.
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
312)20 things you need to know about Albert Einstein, the smartest scientist of the 20th century; Quotes of Aga Khan III.
"There is a fundamental difference between the Jewish idea of creation and that of Islam. 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).
"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).
Questions 5, 6, 7 and 16 are of particular interest:
158)20 things you need to know about Albert Einstein, the smartest scientist of the 20th century.
From TIME magazine, Thursday, April 5th 2007:
1)Was Einstein a slow learner as a child?
Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius. His cocky contempt for authority led him to question conventional wisdom. His slow verbal development made him curious about ordinary things – such as space and time – that most adults take for granted. His father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of a magnetic field for the rest of his life. And he tended to think in pictures rather than words.
2)Was Einstein learning disabled?
Some researchers claim to detect in Einstein’s childhood a mild manifestation of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University, is among those. He writes that autism is associated with a “particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize.” He also notes that this pattern “explains the ‘islets of ability’ that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing -- all skills that benefit from systemizing.”* I do not find such a long-distance diagnosis to be convincing. Even as a teenager, Einstein made close friends, had passionate relationships, enjoyed collegial discussions, communicated well verbally and could empathize with friends and humanity in general.
3)Did Einstein flunk math?
One widely held belief about Einstein is that he failed math as a student, an assertion that is made, often accompanied by the phrase “as everyone knows,” by scores of books and thousands of websites designed to reassure underachieving students. A Google search of Einstein failed math turns up more than 500,000 references. The allegation even made it into the famous “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” newspaper column. Alas, Einstein’s childhood offers history many savory ironies, but this is not one of them. In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a clipping of the Ripley’s column with the headline “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.” Einstein laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” In primary school, he was at the top of his class and “far above the school requirements” in math. By age 12, his sister recalled, “he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic,” and he decided to see if he could jump ahead by learning geometry and algebra on his own. His parents bought him the textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation. Not only did he learn the proofs in the books, he also tackled the new theories by trying to prove them on his own. He even came up on his own with a way to prove the Pythagorean theory.
4)Did Einstein think in pictures rather than words?
Yes, his great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were called Gedankenexperiment -- thought experiments. At age 16, he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light, wouldn’t the light waves seem stationery to you? But Maxwell’s famous equations describing electromagnetic waves didn’t allow that. He knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders, so he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities. So for the next ten years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.
5)What thought picture did Einstein use for special relativity?
Among other things, he pictured lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. A person on the embankment might see the strikes as simultaneous, but to someone on the speeding train they would appear to have happened at different moments. Because the train is speeding forward, the light from the strike at the front of the train would reach him a moment before the light from the strike at the back of the train. From that he realized that simultaneity is relative to your state of motion, and from that he came up with the idea that there is no such thing as absolute time. Time is relative. Hence the special theory of relativity.
6)What was the thought experiment that led Einstein to general relativity?
He imagined a man in free fall. To understand what he saw, imagine a man in a closed elevator chamber that is falling toward the earth. He would float feely in the chamber, and anything he pulled from his pocket and dropped would float freely next to him – just as if he were in a closed chamber sitting still in a gravity-free region of deep outer space. On the other hand, imagine a woman in a closed chamber who is accelerating upward in outer space, far from any gravity. She would feel pulled down to the floor, just as if she were being pulled down by gravity. From the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, he constructed his general theory of relativity.
7)Is there a thought-picture that describes his conclusions about general relativity?
Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. It curves the fabric as it moves. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction (as Newton’s theory had it), but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. O.K., it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was. He was able to come up with a gravitational field equation that showed how matter curved space and how curved space told matter how to move.
8)What was Einstein’s miracle year?
In 1905, Einstein had graduated from college but had not been able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted or get an academic job. So he was toiling six days a week as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office. During his spare time, he produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc2.
9)What was Einstein’s personal life like at the time?
Helping him check his math was a moody Serbian, Mileva Mari, who had been the only woman in his physics class at college. They had fallen passionately in love and had an illegitimate daughter, which he allowed to be given up for adoption before he ever saw her. They then got married and had two boys. Eventually their relationship disintegrated, and Einstein sought a divorce. He offered her a deal: One of those 1905 papers, he presumed, would eventually win the Nobel Prize, and if she gave him a divorce he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Because Einstein’s theories were so radical, it took until 1922 before he was awarded the prize and she could collect.
10)Does Mileva Mari deserve credit as a true collaborator?
Well, she helped with the math. And she put up with him, which was even harder. But a careful analysis of all their letters and later statements shows that the concepts involved were all his. This should not diminish, however, the respect she is due for overcoming most (but not all) of fthe obstacles facing a woman who wanted at that time to be a physicist.
11)How was relativity received?
Scientists were unsure at first whether the general theory was right. But Einstein proposed a dramatic experiment. At the next appropriate eclipse, in 1919, scientists could measure how starlight passing close to the sun was bent by its gravity. The six-deck headline in the New York Times read: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations / Einstein Theory Triumphs.” That was back when folks knew how to write great headlines. Einstein’s launch into fame contributed to the birth of a new celebrity age. He became a scientific supernova and humanist icon, one of the most famous faces on the planet. The public earnestly puzzled over his theories, elevated him into a cult of genius, and canonized him as a secular saint.
12)Why did it take so long for Einstein to get a Nobel Prize?
Initially his 1905 papers were considered baffling and unproven. He was first nominated for the prize in 1910 by the chemistry laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, who had rejected Einstein’s pleas for a job nine years earlier. Ostwald cited special relativity, but the Swedish committee was mindful of the charge in Alfred Nobel’s will that the prize should go to “the most important discovery or invention,” and it felt that relativity theory was not exactly either of those.
The dramatic announcement in November 1919 that the eclipse observations had confirmed parts of Einstein’s theory should have made 1920 his year. But politics intervened. Up until then, the primary justifications for denying Einstein a Nobel had been scientific: his work was purely theoretical, and it putatively did not involve the “discovery” of any new laws. After the eclipse observations, the arguments against Einstein were tinged with more cultural and personal bias, including anti-Semitism. To his critics, the fact that he had suddenly achieved superstar status was evidence of his self-promotion rather than his worthiness of a Nobel. So the 1920 prize instead went to a scientist who was Einstein’s scientific opposite: Charles-Edouard Guillaume, who had made his modest mark on science by assuring that standard measures were more precise and discovering metal alloys that had practical uses, including making good measuring rods.
By 1921, the public’s Einstein mania was in full force, and there was a groundswell of support for him to win the Nobel – indeed, an expressed sense that it would be inexplicable if he didn’t. But the committee was still not ready. The great impasse threatened to become embarrassing. To the rescue rode a theoretical physicist from the University of Uppsala, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who joined the committee in 1922. He realized that the whole issue of relativity theory was so encrusted with controversy that it would be better to try a different tack. So Oseen pushed hard to give the prize to Einstein for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Each part of that phrase was carefully calculated. It was not a nomination for relativity, of course. In fact, despite the way it has been phrased by some historians, it was not for Einstein’s theory of light quanta, even though that was the primary focus of the relevant 1905 paper. Nor was it for any theory at all. Instead, it was for the discovery of a law.
Thus it was that Einstein became the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize, in the words of the official citation, “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.
13)What cultural impact did Einstein’s theories have?
For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties seemed heretical, perhaps even godless. Indirectly, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others were breaking conventional bonds. Infused into this stew was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations.
14)Was Einstein a moral relativist?
Einstein was interpreted as a relativist by many (including some whose disdain fueled their anti-Semitism.) This was not the case. Beneath all of Einstein’s theories, including relativity, was a quest for certainties and absolutes. In fact, he considered calling his masterwork “Invariance Theory” rather than “Relativity Theory,” because it was based on underlying invariances and certainties. His objection to quantum mechanics was that it assumed that the realities of the universe depended on our observation of it, which conflicted with his own faith that there was a reality that existed independent of our ability to observe it.
15)What role did Einstein’s Jewish identity play in his life and achievements?
His affiliation with the Jewish people was the strongest bond in his life, even though he did not adhere to the rituals of the religion. There was an anti-Semitic reaction both to the publicity he got and to the abstract and seemingly heretical nature of relativity theory. But the rise in anti-Semitism made him identify with the Jewish people even more. His first trip to America was to raise money for the Zionist movement, and in 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Princeton. Near the end of his life, he was offered the presidency of Israel, which he politely declined.
16)Did Einstein believe in God?
Yes. He defined God in an impersonal, deistic fashion, but he deeply believed that God’s handiwork was reflected in the harmony of nature’s laws and the beauty of all that exists. He often invoked God, such as by saying He wouldn’t play dice, when rejecting quantum mechanics. Einstein’s belief in something larger than himself produced in him a wondrous mixture of confidence and humility. As he famously declared: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”
When asked directly if he believed in God, he always insisted he did, and explained it once this way: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
17)Are Einstein’s theories still accepted?
Yes. Einstein’s tale encompasses the vast sweep of modern science, from the infinitesimal to the infinite -- from the smallest event imaginable, the emission of photons, to the largest conceivable event, expansion of the cosmos. A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in his universe. Photoelectric cells and television, nuclear power and lasers, space travel and even semiconductors all bear his fingerprints. He signed the letter to President Roosevelt suggesting a project to build an atom bomb, and the letters of his famed equation relating energy to mass hover in our minds when we picture the resulting mushroom cloud. The two great theories that in 1905 he ushered into the 20th century -- quantum theory and relativity -- are still twin pillars (although somewhat incompatible ones) of theoretical physics a century later.
18)Didn’t Einstein reject quantum mechanics?
He believed that quantum mechanics, which has probabilities and uncertainties at its foundation, did not give a complete description of the universe. He spent the second half of his career trying to poke holes in the theory and to subsume it in a unified theory that would restore certainty and determinism to physics. He was not successful, but his lonely and stubborn quest tells us a lot about his personality and mind.
19)What were Einstein’s politics?
He was a pacifist until Hitler came to power and caused him to revise his geopolitical equations. He urged the building of the atom bomb, but then became a leader in the movement to find ways to control it. Just as he sought a unified theory in science, he sought a world federalism that would impose order on competing nations. His belief in the value of free thought and speech, and his merry willingness to defy authority, caused him to be an adamant opponent of McCarthyism.
20)With his resistance to McCarthyism and quantum uncertainty, was Einstein disillusioned at the end?
Einstein was not destined to die a bitter man. He came to understand America’s freedoms, and he was pleased that democracy tended to balance itself after such excesses as the McCarthy investigations. On his deathbed in 1955, he worked on a speech he was scheduled to give for Israeli independence day. “I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,” it began. He put it aside on that final night to pick up a notebook that was filled with scribbled calculations. To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the last thing he wrote, right before the pain overwhelmed him, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.
Related article previously posted by me on my old blog:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/156the-creation-according-to-islam-is.html
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
"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).
Questions 5, 6, 7 and 16 are of particular interest:
158)20 things you need to know about Albert Einstein, the smartest scientist of the 20th century.
From TIME magazine, Thursday, April 5th 2007:
1)Was Einstein a slow learner as a child?
Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius. His cocky contempt for authority led him to question conventional wisdom. His slow verbal development made him curious about ordinary things – such as space and time – that most adults take for granted. His father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of a magnetic field for the rest of his life. And he tended to think in pictures rather than words.
2)Was Einstein learning disabled?
Some researchers claim to detect in Einstein’s childhood a mild manifestation of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University, is among those. He writes that autism is associated with a “particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize.” He also notes that this pattern “explains the ‘islets of ability’ that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing -- all skills that benefit from systemizing.”* I do not find such a long-distance diagnosis to be convincing. Even as a teenager, Einstein made close friends, had passionate relationships, enjoyed collegial discussions, communicated well verbally and could empathize with friends and humanity in general.
3)Did Einstein flunk math?
One widely held belief about Einstein is that he failed math as a student, an assertion that is made, often accompanied by the phrase “as everyone knows,” by scores of books and thousands of websites designed to reassure underachieving students. A Google search of Einstein failed math turns up more than 500,000 references. The allegation even made it into the famous “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” newspaper column. Alas, Einstein’s childhood offers history many savory ironies, but this is not one of them. In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a clipping of the Ripley’s column with the headline “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.” Einstein laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” In primary school, he was at the top of his class and “far above the school requirements” in math. By age 12, his sister recalled, “he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic,” and he decided to see if he could jump ahead by learning geometry and algebra on his own. His parents bought him the textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation. Not only did he learn the proofs in the books, he also tackled the new theories by trying to prove them on his own. He even came up on his own with a way to prove the Pythagorean theory.
4)Did Einstein think in pictures rather than words?
Yes, his great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were called Gedankenexperiment -- thought experiments. At age 16, he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light, wouldn’t the light waves seem stationery to you? But Maxwell’s famous equations describing electromagnetic waves didn’t allow that. He knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders, so he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities. So for the next ten years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.
5)What thought picture did Einstein use for special relativity?
Among other things, he pictured lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. A person on the embankment might see the strikes as simultaneous, but to someone on the speeding train they would appear to have happened at different moments. Because the train is speeding forward, the light from the strike at the front of the train would reach him a moment before the light from the strike at the back of the train. From that he realized that simultaneity is relative to your state of motion, and from that he came up with the idea that there is no such thing as absolute time. Time is relative. Hence the special theory of relativity.
6)What was the thought experiment that led Einstein to general relativity?
He imagined a man in free fall. To understand what he saw, imagine a man in a closed elevator chamber that is falling toward the earth. He would float feely in the chamber, and anything he pulled from his pocket and dropped would float freely next to him – just as if he were in a closed chamber sitting still in a gravity-free region of deep outer space. On the other hand, imagine a woman in a closed chamber who is accelerating upward in outer space, far from any gravity. She would feel pulled down to the floor, just as if she were being pulled down by gravity. From the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, he constructed his general theory of relativity.
7)Is there a thought-picture that describes his conclusions about general relativity?
Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. It curves the fabric as it moves. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction (as Newton’s theory had it), but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. O.K., it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was. He was able to come up with a gravitational field equation that showed how matter curved space and how curved space told matter how to move.
8)What was Einstein’s miracle year?
In 1905, Einstein had graduated from college but had not been able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted or get an academic job. So he was toiling six days a week as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office. During his spare time, he produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc2.
9)What was Einstein’s personal life like at the time?
Helping him check his math was a moody Serbian, Mileva Mari, who had been the only woman in his physics class at college. They had fallen passionately in love and had an illegitimate daughter, which he allowed to be given up for adoption before he ever saw her. They then got married and had two boys. Eventually their relationship disintegrated, and Einstein sought a divorce. He offered her a deal: One of those 1905 papers, he presumed, would eventually win the Nobel Prize, and if she gave him a divorce he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Because Einstein’s theories were so radical, it took until 1922 before he was awarded the prize and she could collect.
10)Does Mileva Mari deserve credit as a true collaborator?
Well, she helped with the math. And she put up with him, which was even harder. But a careful analysis of all their letters and later statements shows that the concepts involved were all his. This should not diminish, however, the respect she is due for overcoming most (but not all) of fthe obstacles facing a woman who wanted at that time to be a physicist.
11)How was relativity received?
Scientists were unsure at first whether the general theory was right. But Einstein proposed a dramatic experiment. At the next appropriate eclipse, in 1919, scientists could measure how starlight passing close to the sun was bent by its gravity. The six-deck headline in the New York Times read: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations / Einstein Theory Triumphs.” That was back when folks knew how to write great headlines. Einstein’s launch into fame contributed to the birth of a new celebrity age. He became a scientific supernova and humanist icon, one of the most famous faces on the planet. The public earnestly puzzled over his theories, elevated him into a cult of genius, and canonized him as a secular saint.
12)Why did it take so long for Einstein to get a Nobel Prize?
Initially his 1905 papers were considered baffling and unproven. He was first nominated for the prize in 1910 by the chemistry laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, who had rejected Einstein’s pleas for a job nine years earlier. Ostwald cited special relativity, but the Swedish committee was mindful of the charge in Alfred Nobel’s will that the prize should go to “the most important discovery or invention,” and it felt that relativity theory was not exactly either of those.
The dramatic announcement in November 1919 that the eclipse observations had confirmed parts of Einstein’s theory should have made 1920 his year. But politics intervened. Up until then, the primary justifications for denying Einstein a Nobel had been scientific: his work was purely theoretical, and it putatively did not involve the “discovery” of any new laws. After the eclipse observations, the arguments against Einstein were tinged with more cultural and personal bias, including anti-Semitism. To his critics, the fact that he had suddenly achieved superstar status was evidence of his self-promotion rather than his worthiness of a Nobel. So the 1920 prize instead went to a scientist who was Einstein’s scientific opposite: Charles-Edouard Guillaume, who had made his modest mark on science by assuring that standard measures were more precise and discovering metal alloys that had practical uses, including making good measuring rods.
By 1921, the public’s Einstein mania was in full force, and there was a groundswell of support for him to win the Nobel – indeed, an expressed sense that it would be inexplicable if he didn’t. But the committee was still not ready. The great impasse threatened to become embarrassing. To the rescue rode a theoretical physicist from the University of Uppsala, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who joined the committee in 1922. He realized that the whole issue of relativity theory was so encrusted with controversy that it would be better to try a different tack. So Oseen pushed hard to give the prize to Einstein for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Each part of that phrase was carefully calculated. It was not a nomination for relativity, of course. In fact, despite the way it has been phrased by some historians, it was not for Einstein’s theory of light quanta, even though that was the primary focus of the relevant 1905 paper. Nor was it for any theory at all. Instead, it was for the discovery of a law.
Thus it was that Einstein became the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize, in the words of the official citation, “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.
13)What cultural impact did Einstein’s theories have?
For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties seemed heretical, perhaps even godless. Indirectly, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others were breaking conventional bonds. Infused into this stew was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations.
14)Was Einstein a moral relativist?
Einstein was interpreted as a relativist by many (including some whose disdain fueled their anti-Semitism.) This was not the case. Beneath all of Einstein’s theories, including relativity, was a quest for certainties and absolutes. In fact, he considered calling his masterwork “Invariance Theory” rather than “Relativity Theory,” because it was based on underlying invariances and certainties. His objection to quantum mechanics was that it assumed that the realities of the universe depended on our observation of it, which conflicted with his own faith that there was a reality that existed independent of our ability to observe it.
15)What role did Einstein’s Jewish identity play in his life and achievements?
His affiliation with the Jewish people was the strongest bond in his life, even though he did not adhere to the rituals of the religion. There was an anti-Semitic reaction both to the publicity he got and to the abstract and seemingly heretical nature of relativity theory. But the rise in anti-Semitism made him identify with the Jewish people even more. His first trip to America was to raise money for the Zionist movement, and in 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Princeton. Near the end of his life, he was offered the presidency of Israel, which he politely declined.
16)Did Einstein believe in God?
Yes. He defined God in an impersonal, deistic fashion, but he deeply believed that God’s handiwork was reflected in the harmony of nature’s laws and the beauty of all that exists. He often invoked God, such as by saying He wouldn’t play dice, when rejecting quantum mechanics. Einstein’s belief in something larger than himself produced in him a wondrous mixture of confidence and humility. As he famously declared: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”
When asked directly if he believed in God, he always insisted he did, and explained it once this way: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
17)Are Einstein’s theories still accepted?
Yes. Einstein’s tale encompasses the vast sweep of modern science, from the infinitesimal to the infinite -- from the smallest event imaginable, the emission of photons, to the largest conceivable event, expansion of the cosmos. A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in his universe. Photoelectric cells and television, nuclear power and lasers, space travel and even semiconductors all bear his fingerprints. He signed the letter to President Roosevelt suggesting a project to build an atom bomb, and the letters of his famed equation relating energy to mass hover in our minds when we picture the resulting mushroom cloud. The two great theories that in 1905 he ushered into the 20th century -- quantum theory and relativity -- are still twin pillars (although somewhat incompatible ones) of theoretical physics a century later.
18)Didn’t Einstein reject quantum mechanics?
He believed that quantum mechanics, which has probabilities and uncertainties at its foundation, did not give a complete description of the universe. He spent the second half of his career trying to poke holes in the theory and to subsume it in a unified theory that would restore certainty and determinism to physics. He was not successful, but his lonely and stubborn quest tells us a lot about his personality and mind.
19)What were Einstein’s politics?
He was a pacifist until Hitler came to power and caused him to revise his geopolitical equations. He urged the building of the atom bomb, but then became a leader in the movement to find ways to control it. Just as he sought a unified theory in science, he sought a world federalism that would impose order on competing nations. His belief in the value of free thought and speech, and his merry willingness to defy authority, caused him to be an adamant opponent of McCarthyism.
20)With his resistance to McCarthyism and quantum uncertainty, was Einstein disillusioned at the end?
Einstein was not destined to die a bitter man. He came to understand America’s freedoms, and he was pleased that democracy tended to balance itself after such excesses as the McCarthy investigations. On his deathbed in 1955, he worked on a speech he was scheduled to give for Israeli independence day. “I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,” it began. He put it aside on that final night to pick up a notebook that was filled with scribbled calculations. To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the last thing he wrote, right before the pain overwhelmed him, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.
Related article previously posted by me on my old blog:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/156the-creation-according-to-islam-is.html
Easy Nash aka easynash
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)
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