Sound Waves Miracle in the Quran
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WikiIslam Archive,
Archives of the first iteration of WikiIslam, prior to acquisition and revamp by Ex-Muslims of North America
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The Quran doesn't mention sound waves at all.
"Miracle"
Today physicists have an audio recording of the Big Bang, 380,000 years compressed to 100 seconds. Click here and listen to the Sound Of The Big Bang.
A 100-second recording represents the sound from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang until about 760,000 years after the Big Bang. 'The original sound waves were not temperature variations, though, but were real sound waves propagating around the universe,' he said. Cramer noted, however, that the 2003 data lacked high-frequency structure. More complete data were recently gathered by an international collaboration using the European Space Agency's Planck satellite mission, which has detectors so sensitive that they can distinguish temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree in the cosmic microwave background. That data were released in late March and led to the new recordings. As the universe cooled and expanded, it stretched the wavelengths to create "more of a bass instrument," Cramer said. The sound gets lower as the wavelengths are stretched farther, and at first it gets louder but then gradually fades. The sound was, in fact, so "bass" that he had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times (that's a 100 followed by 24 more zeroes) just to get the recordings into a range where they can be heard by humans. University of Washington, Listening to the Big Bang- in high fidelity (audio), 2013
But 1400 years ago this was portrayed in the Quran:
[Quran 41.11] Then He directed himself to the Heaven when it was smoke and then said to it and to Earth: "Come willingly or by force" they said "We do come willingly"
The heaven "said" implies the heaven had a voice. Voice means it emitted a sound wave (not a gravitational wave nor an electromagnetic wave). Today we know that heaven gave a sound wave that lasted 380,000 years.
How could an illiterate man who lived 1400 years ago have known that heaven emitted a sound wave?
The verse
From the context we can see that Allah created the Earth first:
41:9 Say, "Do you indeed disbelieve in He who created the earth in two days and attribute to Him equals? That is the Lord of the worlds."
41:10 And He placed on the earth firmly set mountains over its surface, and He blessed it and determined therein its [creatures'] sustenance in four days without distinction - for [the information] of those who ask.
41:11 Then He directed Himself to the heaven while it was smoke and said to it and to the earth, "Come [into being], willingly or by compulsion." They said, "We have come willingly."
41:12 And He completed them as seven heavens within two days and inspired in each heaven its command. And We adorned the nearest heaven with lamps and as protection.
So this is a scientific error in the Quran. According to science, the universe was first and the Earth formed much later.
The Quran obviously thinks that it makes sense to divide the world on two parts "heaven and the earth", which shows that the author of the Quran had no idea about the ratio of the sizes. The world is not made of two main layers, earth below us and heaven above us. The earth is just a small dot in the universe.
If the verse 41:11 is about the Big Bang, then it's an scientific error, because it assumes that the Earth was formed shortly after the Big Bang, which is wrong. Also the verse doesn't talk about sound waves, as apologists try to claim. The verse mentions talking in Arabic! Science didn't prove that "Earth and heavens speak Arabic". The Quranic creation story is a fairy tale that has nothing to do with science.
The audio file that tries to re-create the sound of the Big Bang doesn't sound like Arabic speech at all. Even if the "talking" was a primitive metaphor for sound waves, the scientific article says "the sound from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang until about 760,000 years after the Big Bang" - but the Earth formed much later, billions of years after the Big Bang, so the Earth couldn't have done the "talking" as the Quran mentions it.
