Faithful Reflections

The thin gold band is all the breathable air there is - and it runs out fast on the way up Quran 6:125 Miracle: Why Breathing Gets Hard in the Sky Islamic Research Notes · Qur'an & Science · 28 minute read Before you start There's a line in the Qur'an describing a person whose chest goes tight and squeezed "as though he were climbing into the sky". Nobody in seventh-century Arabia had climbed into the sky, and nobody could have known what it does to a human body. We only worked that out when balloons, aircraft and space medicine forced us to - and some of it cost lives. This is the long version of my notes: the full physics of the atmosphere, what hypoxia actually does to a person, the history of how we learnt it, and then a careful look at how the verse lines up. I've included the parts where I think this genre overclaims, because I'd rather you trusted the article than were impressed by it. What's on this page The verse that...

Time bends. It took physics until the twentieth century to say so out loud Time in the Quran: Relativity and a Day Like 1000 Years Islamic Research Notes · Qur'an & Science · 30 minute read Before you start For most of history everyone assumed time was fixed - one universal clock ticking identically for everybody. Einstein showed that's wrong: time runs at different rates depending on where you are and how fast you're moving. The Qur'an, centuries earlier, speaks about time in a way that never once assumes it's absolute - days of a thousand years, days of fifty thousand, sleepers who lose three centuries and think it was an afternoon. This is the long version of my notes: the real physics with the experiments that confirmed it, every relevant verse with its Arabic, what the classical commentators said, and an honest account of where this argument is strong and where it gets stretched. What's on this page The assumption everyone made for...