Friday, December 8, 2006

13)The new Golden Age of Astronomy

The Hubble Deep Field was a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995 and showed how an unremarkable part of the sky in both the northern and southern hemisphere has tens of millions of galaxies, each with billions to a trillion stars like our own sun:

Hubble Deep space multimedia link ------>> http://hubblesite.org/discoveries/hubble_deep_field/

For me the Deep Field composite picture is,so far, the most amazing picture in Astronomy because the telescope focussed on a supposedly boring part of the sky for 10 straight days and this picture turned up. And this was one picture in the northern hemisphere only. A similar picture was seen in the southern hemisphere. It was on the basis of this picture that scientists have estimated that, roughly, there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each with plus or minus 100 billion to a trillion stars. If the visible universe is only 5% of the entire universe and reveals the above picture, if you count the 25% of the universe that is made up of invisible dark matter and 70% made up of invisible dark energy, this all makes for a gargantuan universe, impossible to imagine or quantify with the feeble instrument of rational human intellect, the mind. 100 billion multiplied by a trillion equals a number no mind can imagine or wrap itself around.

If you are a theist this has implications, one of which is that it shows how feeble the human mind really is, that the human mind cannot imagine its maker or reach it with even the ultimate in rational knowledge and that one needs to use other means to know and understand one's maker. This, then, takes us into the realms of mysticism and the timeless, instantaneous intellect and knowledge revealed to prophets and other inspired human beings.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3