Expert: Jean P. - 1/18/2007

Question
Hi,
I've been reading some of your past answers.First,the Koran never said the sun goes around the earth.Saying the sun and the moon each move in their respective orbits dosn't mean the sun goes around the earth.
You also said "In the same way, if an old book like the Koran had described the whole universe (galaxies, neutron stars, orbits, black holes, the speed of light, the quantum theory, the uncertainty Principle, even some things we don't know yet) BEFORE modern science did, and then observation had confirmed everything the Koran had said, THEN that would be amazing, and the odds would be very small that it was pure chance, and we would all trust the Koran."

the Koran had predicted the speed of light with incredible accuracy.By taking the gravitational field of the sun as the reference frame, you can reach this through two different relativistic formulas from 2 different verses of the book.
You can check it out here:
http://www.speed-light.info/relativity_quran.htm

Fortunately, this one has nothing to do with the interpretations of the words.There are numbers which speak for themeselves.And please don't tell me it's nothing but a simple coincidence.
Don't you think there's a message in all of this?

Best wishes  

Answer
1. The Koran says that the sun and the moon go around in orbits, and in other places talks about the actual place on earth where the sun rises and sets (in a muddy spring, apparently). This, combined with its insistence that the earth is absolutely fixed and unmoving, and that the sky is a "firmament" with fixed stars "hanging" in it, shows that the Koran has no knowledge of heliocentricism whatsoever. Taken in context, the sun's orbit as described by the Koran can mean nothing other than an orbit around the earth, and indeed that was the way it was interpreted for centuries.

2. Your link takes me to a page that offers extremely tenuous links from passages IT SAYS are there in the Koran to the speed of light. Where is this verse? Please quote the actual verse for me.

But let's check it out.

According to your website, "... angels travel in one day the same distance that the moon travels in 1000 lunar years, that is,  12000 Lunar Orbits / Earth Day. "

Angels, according to your website, are supposed to be light - it's not even in the Koran! How can angels be said to BE light? This is a creative interpretation, to put it mildly.

But wait, where does this 12000 come from? 1 Lunar Year is 1 orbit of the moon around the earth, so 1000 Lunar Years is 1000 Lunar Orbits, not 12000.  

Speed of light is approximately 300,000 km per second.

a. One lunar year is 27.3 earth days.

b. So 1000 lunar years is 27,300 earth days.

c. Speed of the moon is 1.023 km per second (Wikipedia), so the distance travelled by the moon in 1000 lunar years is 2.41 billion km.

d. Angels travel this distance in one earth day, according to your site.

e. The speed of angels is approximately 27,900 km per second, which is ONE THOUSAND times less than the speed of light in a vacuum.

If the Koran meant to tell us the speed of light, why didn't it say "HERE IS THE SPEED OF LIGHT"? That was my point in my previous answers - there is never a direct reference to anything that astronomy knows today in ancient texts. Only someone with today's knowledge, today's mathematics, today's science and today's instruments can manipulate the simple numbers mentioned in completely different contexts and make it into something resembling today's known facts.