Part 23

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

Have not considered those who disbelieve that the heavens and the earth were a joined entity, then God parted them and made every living thing from water? Then will they not believe? 

And He placed therein firmly set mountains above its (surface), and He blessed it and determined therein its sustenance in four equal periods, for those who ask. 

Then He directed Himself towards the heaven while it was smoke and said to it and to the earth, “Come both of you willingly or unwillingly.” They both said, “We come willingly.” 

End of Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

O people this universe was created from nothing. Before creation, there was nothing no planets, stars, heavens and earth. All this is created approx. 13.8 billion years ago from singularity through a bang now scientists call The Big Bang. Since then the universe is expanding continuously. The universe is still in its youth and is expected to live more than 30 billion years. After just one-second old universe became thousand times the size of our solar system. At a temperature of 10 million Kelvin but cold enough for quarks to form protons and neutrons. In next few minutes protons and neutrons bound to form a nucleus. After 380,000 years of the Big bang, the first atom appears. From 380,000 years to 150 million years after Big bang first stars formed. In a billion years time galaxies started forming and then after 9 billion years earth and sun were born. 

Stars and galaxies formed because of imperfection and lack of order. If everything all the matter was perfectly aligned and balanced nothing could happen. All happened cause of imperfection that helped gravity to form clusters of matter which then helped in star formation. So if someone says to you that you have made an error a mistake, reply that it is okay as without imperfection we all could not exist. To create a planet full of life, the Universe needed to create large amounts of the heavy elements required for life. To obtain many of those elements, such as Zinc, Copper, Selenium, Tin and Iodine, you need supernovas to have occurred many times in our galaxy as I told you in Part 19. To get others such as Iron, Potassium, Sulfur and Calcium, you need stars massive enough to create them. But the universe was born only with hydrogen and helium. If all you had was hydrogen and helium, it would be impossible to make a star more massive than about three times the Sun’s mass. And in this scenario, these heavy elements would never be created and spread throughout the Universe. The only reason we can exist, today, is because one little imperfection in the early Universe allows the stars to grow hundreds of times massive than the sun. Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? 

We are fortunate, and we need to thank that we live in this time otherwise only 90 years back the knowledge was that there is just one galaxy and that was the whole universe. Now we know that there are billions of galaxies only in the observable universe. Ninety years back universe was static & eternal, but now we comprehend that it had a beginning and that it is expanding.

There are two fundamental properties of the universe that it is homogeneous and Isotropic. Homogeneity means that universe is assumed to be same everywhere i.e every one has same neighbors, and by Isotropic we mean that it has same values in every direction. It’s not that if we look at one direction, it is crowded, and the other is less. On smaller scales e.g within our own Milky way, you can feel differences. But on a scale bigger than few hundred galaxies sky look same in every direction. Having said that there are voids in the universe and some are as big as Sloan Great Wall which is 1.42 billion L.Y in length, located approximately one billion light-years away, and Hercules Corona great Wall.

O people now after listening to these programs especially from part 16 to part 22 you have an idea of the vastness of the Kingdom of God around you and trillions of stars and planets in it. So you think that there is a lot of matter in the Universe. But what if I tell you that it only accounts for about 2 to 4 percent of the mass of the universe. Almost all of the Universe is missing. The other one is called dark matter. The usual material of the universe, known as baryonic matter, is made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Dark matter may be formed of baryonic or non-baryonic matter. Although dark matter has not been directly observed, its existence and properties are understood from its gravitational effects such as the movements of baryonic matter, gravitational lensing, its influence on the universe’s large-scale structure, on the formation of galaxies, and its effects on the cosmic microwave background. The standard model of cosmology indicates that the total mass energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 84% of total mass, while dark energy plus dark matter constitute 95% of the entire mass energy content of the universe. Furthermore, everything is so much fine tuned in this universe that a millionth of a billionth part of variation would result in a total disaster and extinction of everything. Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? 

As I told you in part 16 that whenever we look out into the night and gaze at stars, we are actually experiencing the past. The stars we see in the night sky are very far away from us, so far the star light we see has taken a long time to travel across space to reach our eyes. Thus with powerful telescopes, we are actually looking billions of year in the past. But you can ask that then we should also be able to see the big bang which happened 13.8 billion years in the past. In fact between us and bing bang there is a wall, not a physical but a barrier to see further in the past. This edge of the observable Universe is about 13.8 billion light-years away. The light from that point left when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, and only now has finally reached us. What’s even strange, the place that emitted that radiation is now 46 billion light-years away from us. First, think the universe is 13.8 billion years old so if we look far enough then we can see big bang. In principle this is true but about 100,000 years after the big bang, just after the universe born early universe temperature was very high 1 Billion Kelvin. And at that temp hydrogen broken a part every time proton and electron try to bind together so there was a charged plasma of these particles and that plasma was opaque for radiations. In practice, we can see the light only from as far back as the time of photon decoupling in the recombination epoch. That is when particles were first able to emit photons that were not quickly reabsorbed by other particles. Before then, the universe was filled with a plasma that was opaque to photons. After more 280,000 years passed after the bing bang, the temperature dropped to 4000K and electrons and atomic nuclei first become bound to form neutral atoms. Photons are no longer in thermal equilibrium with matter and the Universe first becomes transparent. Now as of today that overall temperature of the universe is dropped to 3 degrees Kelvin and this is the remanent, the afterglow of BigBang which we could see on our Old TV sets. The moment universe became neutral and transparent is called the surface of the last scattering.  If we could have microwave eyes, we can see every night big bang in the sky. We can see that explosion now as we have a way to see this cosmic glow with the naked eye. Switch your old television set and between channels, a significant portion of static you see on your tv is radiation from the big bang.

Let’s talk something about the fate of our universe. There are various theories on this like Big Crunch in which the matter, space and time in the universe collapse into a dimensionless singularity same as it was before the Big Bang. The second theory is Big Rip in which all expansion of the universe will cause all forms of matter to go far from each other and then cause them to rip apart. The third is Big Freeze in which stars are expected to form normally for a trillion more years, but ultimately the supply of gas needed for star formation will be depleted. As existing stars run out of fuel and stop shining, the universe will slowly grow darker. Ultimately black holes will dominate the universe, which themselves will disappear over time as they emit Hawking radiation. Fourth and last major theory regarding universe’s fate is the Big Slurp. It’s a new theory postulated after Higgs bosons discovery in LHC Large Hadron Collider by Cern. In this model, if the Higgs Boson particle weighs in at a certain mass, it could indicate that this space this vacuum of our universe may be inherently unstable, perhaps existing in a perpetual metastable state. This kind of a vacuum metastability event could happen at virtually any moment, anywhere in our universe. The bubble could pop over and start expanding at light-speed until it swallowed us entirely.

The current consensus of the most scientific community is that the ultimate fate of the universe depends on its overall shape and how much density of matter it has either enough to halt expansion or less than that. Critical density is the average density of matter required for the Universe to just halt its expansion. To date, the critical density is estimated to be approximately six atoms of hydrogen per cubic meter, whereas the average density of ordinary matter that we can see in the Universe is believed to be only 0.2–0.25 atoms per cubic meter.

We can determine the end of our universe. The fate of the universe is determined by a struggle between the expansion and the pull of gravity. Let me give you a tennis ball example when you throw a ball in the air it goes up and then comes down because of negative, positive energies. In ball’s case, negative energy is gravity which pulls and +ve is kinetic energy which speeds it up. The ball will escape in outer space and will never come back on the ground if +ve energy is greater. So in simple, if the total energy is bigger than zero it escape if it is less than zero it returns. So for the universe, the negative piece is all matter and dark matter, and the positive piece is the speed of expansion which Hubble tells us. So -negative is “Gravity,” and +ve is “Expansion”. Then if G/Expansion>1 universe will collapse and if G/E<1 expand forever. This rate of expansion is expressed by the Hubble Constant, while the strength of gravity depends on the density of the matter in the universe. 

Now it’s clear that the contracting force is because of matter and its gravity but you can ask what is the reason for the expansion of the universe as in the case of a ball that we throw towards the sky; it is our own force with which we throw it. Well after Edwin Hubble in 1920 discovered the universe was not static and born in a Big Bang, after that, it was long thought the gravity of matter in the universe was certain to slow the expansion of the universe. Until, in 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of very remote supernovas unveiled that a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. Then the results of the WMAP mission and observations of distant supernova have suggested that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, which implies the existence of a form of matter with a strong negative pressure. This strange form of matter with negative pressure is called dark energy and it is a big mystery in science.

Now this energy of empty space (dark energy) vs density of matter chart along with the timeline of the universe shows that they are passing through each other at this point when we human beings are in this universe. Otherwise in the future density of matter will decrease. So that means in future with the energy of empty space objects will move far and far even more than the speed of light. Although nothing can travel more than the speed of light but on an expansion scale as big as this observable universe this is happening even now. That means if we wait long enough the rest of the universe will disappear. This expansion would not only be just for the space between galaxies but the space within them and then a time will come that the galaxies, stars, planets, and matter even the subatomic building blocks that comprise all matter can no longer hold themselves together, at which point they rip apart.

O humankind this is the knowledge you have reached so far about the Kingdom of God around you. But only God Knows the reality. As in Last Scripture God said,

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

They ask you about the Hour, when will be its appointed time? Say, “Its knowledge is only with my Lord. None can reveal its time except Him. It lays heavily upon the heavens and the earth. It will not come to you but suddenly.” They ask you as if you were well informed about it. Say, “Its knowledge is only with God, but most of the people do not know.” They have not appraised God with the true appraisal, while the earth entirely will be within His grip on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens will be folded in His right hand. Exalted is He and high above what they associate with Him.

And the Trumpet will be blown, and whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth will fall dead except whom God wills. Then it will be blown a second time, and behold! They will be standing and waiting.

And the earth will shine with the light of its Lord, and the record of deeds will be placed, and the prophets and the witnesses will be brought, and it will be judged between them in truth, and they will not be wronged.