Give what’s to Cosmology to Cosmology and what’s to religion to religion

Now here’s a headline that can’t be ignored:

“Heaven and Earth: Science college grants PhD on miracles in the Quran”

This thesis doesn’t bring science any closer to religion. It simply attributes scientific discoveries to the Quran. Here are a few problems with its scientific content, though. Quoting:

“Scientists have proposed the Big Bang Theory to explain the creation of the universe. And after analyzing the Quranic verses, one can conclude that the end [of the world] would come as a result of what geologists call ‘The Big Crunch.’ “

So here is some basic Cosmology. If the energy (or energy density to be precise) of the Universe is smaller than a critical value, indeed a Big Crunch in inevitable. If it is equal to that critical value, at some point in time the Universe will slow down its expansion rate but it will still expand forever. If, however, the energy density is bigger than the critical value, the Universe will continue to expand at an ever increasing rate, i.e. it will expand faster and faster.

How do we know which one is the actual case? Do we check it in the Quran, the Bible, or any text whatsoever? No, we MEASURE it. This is what Cosmologists have been working for a long time and in the last couple of years, they arrived at a result. The energy density of the Universe has been measured and it is bigger than the critical value. So observations lead to the conclusion that the Universe is going to expand with no limit at an ever-increasing rate. Sorry to dissappoint the fans but no long awaited Big Crunch. Even if there was going to be one, it won’t be waiting on it anyway. Maybe you can if you got a few billions years of spare time.

So this disagrees with the Quranic “result,” which one do we believe? I guess approximations are way more flexible in language interpretations than in Hubble data Cosmology. And yeah, Arabic is one of the richest languages (definitely richer than Binary and Mathematics). Sorry, but this PhD thesis won’t pass for a term paper for a Cosmology 101 course. Check out other informed people have put up on Wikipedia.

Also, he goes on:

“The scientific theory of relativity has also reached that conclusion. If you bring two magnetic poles and keep them at a long distance from each other, you would observe repulsion rather than attraction. But once the attraction takes place it would materialize quickly. This is what will happen at the end.”

This last piece is total nonsense. Relativity is at the core of Cosmology, so there is no “also” in “also reached.” He then tries and fails to describe the repulsive Casimir force between any two objects (not just magnetic poles) when they are VERY close (not “at a long distance”) to each other. The Casimir force is a quantum effect in which relativistic effects are play nor role at all and are also ignorable . In addition, there is nothing yet observed as a magnetic pole (it is only theoretically proposed but I don’t he even meant this since magnetic poles has nothing to do with the Casimir effect), there are magnets and magnetic dipoles, but no magnetic monopoles as the writer implies. Even if this is all true, what does all this talk of magnetic poles have got to do with the whole Universe. Gravity is much stronger than electricity and magnetism on the large scale and therefore all electric and magnetic effects are ignored when doing Cosmology: only mass/gravitational energy matters. Again, this kind of talk won’t let him pass a beginning Electricity and Magnetism course.

A New Protest Song

Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Dylan for the New Age: