Who could've predicted blackholes? Shakespeare.
OP - December 18, 2015, 08:02 AM
I was reading:
Embryology in the Quran: Much Ado About Nothing - A Refutation of Hamza Tzortzis' Scientific Linguistic Analysis of Chapter 23
which I'm sure many of you might have read but I just love the part where the author beats the apologists at their own game (lexical gymnastics of Arabic to prove a miracle). Posting it for those who might have missed.
It's pretty elegant this part:
The Tempest Act 1, Scene 2
“What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
The following is a demonstration of what Hamza calls “lexical analysis” applied to the above lines from Shakespeare.
“The statement from Shakespeare, asks what one can see in the “dark” “backward” and “abysm” of time?
The word “dark” carries various meanings such as: absence of light, night, dark color, black, being hidden, invisible, absorbing more light than it reflects, ignorance, inmmoral (all definitions taken from Oxford English Dictionary).
The word “backward” has a myriad of meanings such as: to put or keep back, delay, retard. To send back, return, towards one’s back or the back of anything, to bend backward, fall backward, be pushed backward, to retire, towards a worse state, unwilling, slowness of conception or action (all definitions taken from Oxford English Dictionary).
The words “abysm” has several meanings including: great deep, bottomless chasm, infernal pit, hell, void space, a condition from which recovery is impossible, to sink in (all definitions taken from Oxford English Dictionary).
Scientific Interpretation:
Upon a linguistic and scientific analysis of the Shakespearean words, the myriad of meanings of the terms in the statement corresponds to what is known today in modern astronomy. This statement is describing the existence and nature of black holes.
The meanings of the word “dark” such as “absence of light”, “black”, “being hidden”, “invisible” “absorbing more light than it reflects” are describing the dim nature of black holes where the strength of the gravitational field would prevent even light from escaping. This characteristic causes black holes to be “hidden” from human view due to “the absence of light” i.e. the light from the black holes would not escape and reach the human eye. The term “backward” coupled with the term “dark” paints an image of either light or any other object “falling backwards” into the black hole. The term “abysm” refers to the “deep” or “bottomless” nature of black holes as well as the fact that black holes consist mostly of empty, “void space”. The term “backward” which carries the meaning of “slowness” coupled with the term “time” refers to the gravitational time dilation or the slowing down of time in the black holes. These phenomenons are described by the theoretical physicist Jim al-Khalili in the following manner;
Page 40, “Let us consider what happens when an even bigger star, say twenty or thirty times the mass of the Sun, stops shining. Such a star will not be able to resist its own gravitational collapse. It will keep on collapsing until it has been squashed to such a density that even its own light cannot escape its gravitational pull. To someone watching from a distance the star will suddenly disappear from view. It has become a black hole”
Page 66, “A black hole corresponds to the case when a very heavy, yet point sized, object causes the rubber (space) to be curved and stretched down into an infinitely deep cone-shaped hole. The event horizon here corresponds to a circle somewhere inside the rim of this bottomless pit beyond which there would be no escapes.”
Page 70, “However, because of the way space and time are mixed up inside a black hole, you continue to fall at the same rate as before. It is just that your time will slow down. This is known as gravitational time dilation.”
Page 84, “So the particles of light would not be fast enough to escape its gravitational pull. Such a star must therefore look black to the outside world. In fact, it would be invisible”
Page 84, “Black holes, as we understand them today, comprise almost entirely of empty space! In fact they are literally holes in space, inside which the properties of space and time are completely altered.”
Jim Al-Khalili, (1999) Black holes, wormholes, and time machines. Institute of Physics Publishing. Philadelphia.
William-o-akbar! Poetic ownage.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. - Alvin Toffler
Topic: Who could've predicted blackholes? Shakespeare.