'And this is We Who have constructed the heaven with might, and verily, this is We Who are steadily expanding it'
-Surah Adh-Dhariyat:47

Being a miracle of the 'time dimension', Qurran states countless facts about the nature of space and time, which normally transcend our general understanding. Today it is possible to comprehend some of those facts and figures through direct observation and experiment. This was not so in the previous centuries.

There is no doubt that we cannot simply pin point many of the predictions and facts mentioned in the Qurran directly because of two interdependent reasons: first, they are not meant for our century so we will not be able to comprehend them. This is due to the fact that Qurran is miracle in 'time dimension', and we don't have any control over 'time'. Second, it is also true that unless we don't experience something apparently by coincidence, we don't ponder that it was already mentioned in the Qurran. This is because when 'time' comes for the guidance, some facts and figures miraculously start making sense.

In the case of the understanding of Universe through Qurran, we observed the 'time dimension' in play. The knowledge of the Universe, namely 'Cosmology' is considered as one of the most respected branches of science and technology in our age. It deals with the birth, content, and fate of the Universe, which are ancient questions and were not answered due to technological limitations in the past. It is not that we have come to know everything, but we are confident that we are on the right path, which leads to the real knowledge. It is remarkable that now we are able to calculate from various sources that Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Cosmology stands on the foundations of modern physics which are the General Theory of Relativity (science of extremely large i.e., stars and galaxies) and the Quantum Physics (science of extremely small i.e., atoms) without them today's development could not be achieved. Since fourteen centuries no one on record declared that Qurran is saying that the Universe is not what it seems; it could be moving and expanding. General concept was that Universe is static, doesn't change, and perhaps infinite in both, space and time. But when the time came for the understanding of the Universe, the un-alterable Qurran suddenly showed up the signs, which are guiding those who now need guidance in this new research.

The expansion of the Universe is the diverse concept and possesses extreme philosophical and religious consequences. This concept puts under question the dogmas of every school of thought either it is science or religion. It also threatens the way common Muslims believe. The expanding Universe implies that not only it is expanding but it also had a beginning in time and space both. Thus being the integral parts of the Universe, time and space both started with its beginning. The reason why 'time' should have a beginning is that the current mathematics and theories involving the science of 'black holes' clearly define that 'time' must be frozen inside a certain boundary of a black hole, where the gravity of a big star is concentrated in an unimaginably small space. General Theory of Relativity predicts that 'time' slows down when gravity increases, thus time stops when the gravity becomes infinite. The data shows that in the beginning, the Universe was infinitely concentrated in a point which was smaller than an atom, thus the gravity was also infinite, indicating that 'time' was frozen at that instant and later on 'melted away' with the expansion of the Universe. In conclusion, the beginning of the Universe and now the Black Holes are two events of space and time when 'time' cannot be said as 'passing'. These properties of time have experimentally been confirmed many times through space missions and GPS satellites. Why do our brains not accept these effects of time? The reason is that we have been always living on Earth, born in already accelerated motion of Earth, and with slow velocities as compared to the speed of light in Earth's gravitational field which encapsulates the effects of the rest of the Universe (Law of Inertia), which is also responsible to make us feel the 'constant' arrow of time which is passing forward as 'normal'. This 'normal' time passing has a mathematical relation with Earth's gravity, but has nothing to do with the whole Universe. It is something like a fly born in the moving train and doesn't know what's her speed in relation to Earth and Sun in the orbit. We are so accustomed to Earth that any event which takes place in different circumstances other than Earth's, we want to judge it by 'Earthly' standards, hence, facing the apparent 'counter-intuition'.

Being part of the Universe, we are traveling at tremendous speed in the space. Every galaxy (collection of stars) is getting away from each other at millions of miles per hour. The farther the galaxy is, the faster it appears to us moving away from us. We are travelling near the speed of light in the space in relation to farther galaxies we observe. The question is, if it is proved that Universe had a beginning, then what was before it? If it is proved through Science and Scripture that Universe is expanding, it is expanding into what? Where does the Universe push to create more space in it? Is there another space beneath it? We must know that 'Expansion' can only make sense when the Universe is 'Finite'. If there is another 'space' or 'subspace' beneath our Universe, is that 'finite' too? In theory, if that underlying space is also 'finite' then it must have had a beginning too. In this case, the same question arises, what was before it? Thus supported by science and theory, the underlying space (called Hyperspace in theoretical physics) in which the Universe is floating, spinnig, or orbiting, must be infinite. Why do we need to bother for that underlying space which appears too impractical for us to work with? The answer is mentioned later in this article.

In 1920s, the astronomers especially Edwin Hubble, were using the latest and largest telescopes of their time to observe and tap into the Universe. It was considered at that time that the Universe is just a collection of millions of stars. But they declared that our Sun is part of a galaxy, Milky Way, which alone contains billions of stars. Please scroll down to see the image 'Hubble Deep Filed'. Furthermore, Universe is far larger than we can even imagine. There are more galaxies in the space than we have stars in our galaxy. Not even Hubble showed that there are billions upon billions galaxies out there, but also that they are moving away from each other at a known rate which is about 72km/sec. So farther the galaxy is, faster it moves away from us. This is like the dots on the balloon which get farther to each other when the balloon is blown up. This was possible to calculate through special methods known as Spectroscopy (technique: Doppler effect) and the Standard Candle.

In the Spectroscopic Doppler effect, the light passes through a sensitive prism. If the source is moving away from us, the total spectrum would be shifted towards the red end (Red Shift), and if the source is moving towards us, the spectrum is shifted towards the blue end (Blue End). It is also possible to determine the composition and the elements found in the celestial objects through this technique because some frequencies of light are absorbed or emitted by the presence of some elements creating distinctive dark and bright lines. For instance, In the Sun the hydrogen and helium were found using this method. Not only that, the stars were found to be of the same composition which meant that all stars are the Suns. Later on, when we found many planets orbiting other stars, this theory was confirmed. However, the issue of life is still restricted to our Solar System. In the Standard Candle method, a kind of star with known brightness is searched in various galaxies. So if that kind of star appears very dim in a certain galaxy, it means that the galaxy is very far. If we trace the paths of galaxies backward in time, then it is clear that all were started from the same source, thus the Universe had a beginning and it is expanding at tremendous rate.

Then in 1960s, another evidence came in the favor of this concept of beginning, which is now called The Big Bang Theory which predicted the existence of a radiation (or echo of the Big Bang) which started off after 300,000 years of the Big Bang and should now be stretched to Microwave frequencies due to expansion of the Universe. This radiation was finally detected through radio dishes and later on many advanced devices including space-bound, were already doing research on it. It was named 'Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation' or CMB. Current data from satellites show that we can not only detect the radiation from the beginning when Universe exploded into existence out of nothing at all, but also the tiny fluctuations of temperature when we scanned the whole sky to create the density map. Look for a density on the map, and you will find a large structure (a galaxy or dense cluster of galaxies) exactly at that place in the space. Very less dense regions indicate the emptiness. Space is filled with this radiation. When our radios and TV sets are not tuned on any channel, this noise contains the significant amount of this ancient echo of the bang of the beginning (Big Bang), which implies the beginning of the Universe. The beginning and the expansion are so important concepts in science which have passed many experiments and the theoretical implications that we are confident that we have the overall picture of the Universe, if not complicated details. Please click on the following thumbnails to enlarge the images:

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Full Sky Microwave Background Radiation Map		Earth from Moon. Can you tell, which side of Earth is 'Up'?		Hubble Deep Filed - Each blob of light is a Galaxy like ours