The achievements of the scientific method in the hands of the converts to it, i.e., the Europeans, soon began to be felt in all the branches of science.
In Astronomy the uneven surface of the Moon was seen The dark spots on the surface of the Sun were discovered. The moons of Jupiter and Mars and the girdles round Saturn were discovered, and speculation about the origin of the solar system was started. Another small planet, Pluto, was added to the solar system as late as 1930.
In Physics and Chemistry the atomic theory was firmly established and science reached a stage where it discovered the element Helium in the atmosphere of-the sun before it could be found on the earth. Undulatory theory of light was fully established and it was due to the advances in the field of light that Helium was discovered on the Sun before it could be isolated on the earth. The kinetic theory of matter emerged; and a complete list of 92 atoms, regularly divided into groups, was discovered. The laws of conservation of energy and matter were fully and finally established.
The determinist school of scientists began to claim that if they could know fully about the present numbers and states of atoms, it should be possible to express the past, present and the future of the material universe by means of equations.
The electromagnetic theory of light was established; and thus heat, light, electricity and magnetism, which were
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originally thought to be different kinds of forces, were brought together as different aspects of some fundamental unity.
Spectroscopy and photography began to reveal the hidden secrets of the farthest corners of the material universe, visible through bigger and bigger telescopes. Cosmologists were wondering about the transfer of life to the earth from some other source through the interplanetary space. This was one of the deepest problems of the Philosophy of Science at the
time.
Production of artificial dyes and other organic chemicals in the laboratory, and later, on industrial sca!e, shook the faith in the hidden vital force which could alone produce organic chemicals, characterising the living beings. Above all the theory of evolution by Darwin end others showed that all living species had originated from simple unicellular bodies in mud and water and evolved into what they are now, by the continuous struggle for existence, by adaptation to the environment and by survival of the fittest This led to the mutation of species which, though not fully understood, was fully demonstrated by the discovery of skeletons of earliest species-; by the Geologists and Geomorphoiogists in the deepest layers of the earth.
On the mechanical side, the toy of a revolving twin-jet of escaping steam was developed into steam-engine for driving locomotives and other machines and into turbines of the steamship engines. Electric dynamo and motor were invented and innumerable mechanical devices simplified, or rather, mechanised the human life. Many of the scientists began to claim that man and his mind was also a form of a machine. in fact, many scientists began to believe that the entire universe was a machine in which man was just a small cog. Others thought that man was just one of the advanced species of animals and nothing more.
Newton's Law of Gravitation established the theory that One piece of matter could attract another piece of matter at.
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a distance without any material connecting link between the two pieces, through gravitation. And what was this gravitation? It was only a kind of field, which was considered to be a sort of tension of some kind in the space in between two Material bodies.
Faraday extended the concept of the fields by putting forward the concepts of Lines of Force round electrical and
magnetic bodies and of Tubes of Force starting from one electrified or magnetised body and ending on the surface of the body oppositely charged. These Lines of Force and Tubes of Force had a tendency to contract and expressed themselves as a force of attraction between two oppositely charged bodies and as a force of repulsion between bodies charged similarly.
Huyghen's wave theory of Sight called for the existence of a non-material flexible and elastic medium—Ether—-per vading everywhere in the matter and the void, to carry the transverse waves of Sight Hertz showed experimentally that electric waves were produced on changes in an electric field. Maxwell developed mathematical equations which showed that both the light waves and the Hertzean electric waves were electro- magnetic radiations in Ether. Also, the electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other were found to be the basis of all these electromagnetic
radiations, and were not only a physical fact but also a mathematical reality.
The gravitational and electromagnetic fields were supposed to spread through Ether by longitudinal and transverse stresses respectively. Further, elucidation of mathematical and experimental properties of the medium pervading everywhere, viz., Ether, opened out entirely new aspects of Nature, some of which appeared to be entirely against common sense and against geometrical and physical concepts which had been . found and developed In the past.
Non-Euclidean Geometry developed by Reimann, Lorentz and others and the Theory of Relativity proposed by
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Einstein altered the very basis of rational thinking and rationality itself. The basis of age-old concepts of causality and of continuity and atomicity were completely changed.
As a reaction to the material realists, there had emerged a school of idealist Philosophy. Berkeley believed that everything resulted from the appreciation of Man, otherwise there was nothing more that had any significance.
While the philosophic off-shoots of the advances in Science, Mathematics and Astronomy were being hotly discussed and pursued, the scientists themselves were trying to assess the position of science and technology in teleoiogical processes. Towards the end of the 19th century the famous Lord Kelvin, in his presidential address to the annual session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, declared that the future advances of science would be in the sixth and higher places of decimal. This was a pronouncement by one of the greatest authorities in science of the period. Its implication was that he felt that all that v as necessary had been discovered about the nature of things in the material . universe. The only progress that could be made would be by better measurements and greater precision. But Nature is always full of ingenious tricks in its hat.
At the time when Kelvin was making his pronouncement, the negative result of Morley-Michelson's experiment about the relative velocity of light in the East-West ana North-South directions on the earth was shaking the foundations on which stood the whole structure of science known up to that time. A satisfactory solution had not yet been found out. The phenomenon of discharge of electricity through gases was being studied. The properties of the heavy elements, heavier than mercury and gold, were being studied; and many more similar revolutionary studies were in the progress.
The twentieth century brought with it the discovery of the cathode-rays, the X-rays and radio-waves which extended the spread of electromagnetic waves over a very wide range
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indeed. The photo-electric effect proved that he absorption of electromagnetic radiations did not occur continuously Radio-activity shattered the solidity of material atoms. Movement of the perihelion of the planet Mercury against Newton's Law of Gravitation destroyed the common sense model of the citadel of Nature. The studies of black-body radiations made it necessary to change the notion about the nature of radiation.
Electron, Proton, and later on the Neutron, were discovered.
Thus the whole basis and structure of 19th century science was disturbed and changed.
92 atoms, the fundamental particles of the nineteenth century, which could not be broken up into smaller portions, and which could neither be created nor destroyed, were re-duced to systems composed of three fundamental particles:
electron, proton and neutron.
Photo-electricity and radio-activity of the early twen-tieth century shook the faith in the deterministic philosophy of the nineteenth century. When ultra-violet light or light of other colours fell upon a bright metallic surface, electrons jumped off from it; but this was contrary to expectations based on the reduction of intensity according to the inverse-square law. All of the electrons ejected from the surface were so very much alike that you could not identify any as distinct from all others, but you could say how many of them will be ejected when radiation of a particular frequency fell upon the surface.
When a given mass of radio-active substance was allowed to disintegrate, you knew how long it will take to reduce itself to half, you knew how much Alpha, Beta or Gamma rays will be emitted, but you could never say which atoms will break up and transmute themselves into new atoms and radiations.
So far we were, certain that Alpha rays were really a shower of positively-charged electrical particles of approxi-mately known masses, moving with very high velocities, Beta rays Were showers of negatively-charged electrical particles, also moving with very high velocities approaching the velocity of light, Gamma rays were electromagnetic radiations like light
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and X-rays but much more penetrating. At about the same time, physicists were studying black-body radiation. This led Planck to the conclusion that radiation did not take place in a continuous way, but consisted of bundles of energy, which were called Quanta and recognised as Photons. His theory was called Quantum Theory.
Rutherford suggested a model for the structure of atoms in which the positive electric charge was concentrated at the centre in the nucleus round which revolved electrons on definite elliptic orbits, at different distances, like the planets round the sun. But according to this model radiation had to be continuous while the photo-electric effect and black-body radiation had shown that absorption and emission of light was not continuous, ft was established by Bohr that emission or absorption of radiation was the result of jumping of electrons from one orbit to another and the magnetic and electric fields could distort or modify these orbits. But just as in the case of the movement of the perihelion of Mercury, the old New-tonian dynamics could not explain the micro-dynamics of electrons revolving round the nucleus and not emitting and absorbing radiation continuously.
To correlate these new observations and advances of science, the entirely new theory of Relativity, the Quantum theory and the theory of Wave-Mechanics were proposed and found to be as generally operative as the old Saw of Gravitation or the Electro-magnetic theory were found up to the end of the nineteenth century. It was experimentally shown that electrons, protons, etc., were also bundles of waves like photons.
Dalton's theory of indestructible material atoms was gone, and along with it a very solid base of materialism disappeared. Now the material universe is the name of some bundles of waves, some whirls of energy of different sizes, charges and orientations to which we give the name of "Elementary Particles1'.
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Time became one of the dimensions of the material world tike its length, breadth and thickness, and Eddington, in the introduction to his book, Space, Time and Gravitation
clarified the implication of this change as an additional degree of freedom to all material bodies by saying that if some body is locked up in a room and all the sides in length, breadth and height of the room are closed, but because the room as well as the body inside it are four-dimensional, i.e., they have four degrees of freedom, but the fourth dimension of Time has not been closed; hence, if the body inside it had the capacity to use its freedom in this direction, it could certainly come out or go into the three-dimensional room even when the six sides of the room remained closed. It is something like this. Suppose that on a plot of land you are surrounded by six-feet high walls on all sides. If you Know how to jump across the wall, i.e , if you know how to use your degree of freedom in the third dimension by jumping over the wall, you can go in and come out of the wailed prison at your will. Similar will be the case of a body having four degrees of freedom to jump out of or into a closed room from the fourth dimension. This is not fiction but a physical reality according to the understanding of modern science.
In ordinary life, time is an irreversible movement from past to present and future. To go backwards in this dimension is not possible, but according to mathematical equation showing the distance as travelled by a body in terms of the changes in its co-ordinates in the four dimensions from x, y, z and t to (x + dx), (y + dy), (z + dz), and (t + dt), its value can be both positive and negative because c2 dt2 = dx2+dy2 + dx2
or dt = ± / dx2+ dy2 + dz2 where c is the velocity c
of light. H.G. Wells, using the same property of the four-dimensional space-time continuum had introduced the time-machine in his novels for going backwards and forwards in time, as you go backwards and forwards in the three dimensions of length, breadth and thickness. This is just a
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dramatic expression in words of the meaning of the relationship:-dt =± /ds2 + dx2 + dy2 + dz2 c
The negative value of the square-root on the right hand side would mean going backwards in time,
In the Quantum, Theory, the energy in radiation is not emitted continuously but in bundles or quanta when an electron jumps from one orbit in the atom to another. The amount of energy issued or absorbed is equal to the change in the momentum of the electron in passing over from one orbit to the other. This is equal to a constant 'h' multiplied by the frequency of radiation V (Greek letter nu).
The Quantum Theory brought back the theory about the corpuscular nature of light, from waves to particles. Now, light was to be regarded as consisting of both particles (or, the photons) for some purposes, and of waves for others. The wave-mechanists explained away all the phenomena by bringing in the concepts of group-velocity and wave group-velocity and by showing that the photon was only a group of waves travelling with the velocity of light.
In wave-mechanics, another very funny thing became clear.
While the electrons jump from one orbit to the other inside the atom, they cross the intervening four-dimensional space in between the two, but theoretically their existence in that space is impossible. This theoretical conclusion is fully supported by actual observation, because in the intervening apace, between the two orbits in an atom, the electrons cannot be located by any means at the disposal of science.
This means that the electron is annihilated in one orbit and created in the other. This cannot be so, because the mechanism which gives rise to emission or absorption of radiation cannot- both annihilate and create a body at the same time.
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In view of this situation, the only way in which the transfer of an electron from one orbit to the other could be conceived was as follows;
Inside an atom the electromagnetic field is very strong, being about 1040 times stronger than gravitation. We also know that the nature of electromagnetism is quite different from that of gravitation, which is the function of the four-dirnensional space-time continuum. It was explained that elec-tromagnetism is the exhibition of a higher degree of freedom in the field inside the atom, say, the fifth dimension. Due to the strong electromagnetic field inside the atom, when an electron is knocked out from an orbit, it is thrown out of the four-dimensional continuum of space-time and travels in the fifth dimension of electromagnetism. This is tne reason why it cannot be located in the four-dimensional space intervening the two electron orbits inside the atom. Wonderful! Very wonderful indeed! The mathematical equations developed for the travel of electron in lower degrees of freedom term it impossible in this region,
Relativity has shown to us that this material universe is four-dimensional. Quantum Theory and Wave Mechanics have taught us that even a fifth dimension is equally available in our material environment to make passage of perceptible bodies like electrons possible in it—a passage hidden from the eye, so much so that it cannot be seen even by mathematical equations, because these equations describe conditions in the four-dimensional continuum and show that it is impossible for such particles to exist in this four-dimensional space in between two orbits inside the atom. At this stage I will ask you to remember this when we discuss the miracle of Isra'—the bodily travel by night of Prophet Muhammad (P,U.H.) from Masjid al-Haram to Masjid al-Aqsa by an electromagnetic vehicie, the Burraq.
The point which I wish to emphasize is that the twentieth century advances of science have shown that this
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rial universe in which we live is not only three-dimensional, in which matter can block the movements, but also four-dimensional and even five-dimensional. And, what is a dimension in mathematics? It is the name of degrees of freedom. In science, while we were trying to correlate our experiences, we started with the correlation of dimensional phenomena by dimensional equipment and three-dimensional concepts and language. As our knowledge advanced we were forced to take into account higher and higher degrees of freedom—four and five dimensional occurrences. Things which appear impossible and irrational when looking upon them from the point of view of lower degrees of freedom become possible and valid when higher degrees of freedom are taken into account We shall stop here for the time being and have a look at some other miraculous advances of science in the twentieth century.
While wave and particle nature of a photon was being ascertained and explained, J. P. Thomson and others showed that an electron also was of the same nature. The electron also proved to be a wave and a particle at the same time. Researches in Cosmic rays and Atomic Physics have now revealed about 90 elementary particles, which can be grouped in families of 8 to 10. These are all of similar
While wave and particle nature of a photon was being ascertained and explained, J. P. Thomson and others showed that an electron also was of the same nature. The electron also proved to be a wave and a particle at the same time. Researches in Cosmic rays and Atomic Physics have now revealed about 90 elementary particles, which can be grouped in families of 8 to 10. These are all of similar