Black holes in Quran?!

[Loler]

Hi, a Muslim brought this verse

 

Here's it:

 

{ فَلا أُقْسِمُ بالخُنَّسِ الجَوَارِ الكُنَّسِ }

 

Since i can speak Arabic, I know that بالخُنَّسِ means invisible, and الجَوَارِ الكُنَّسِ means that runs and sweep

And black holes are invisible, and they move through space, So we can say that they run through space, and they sweep

and the Quran is describing them???? Please debunk this..

Also this isn't talking about planets, translations maybe different, but I know and Arabic, and this verse can never refer to planets, I mean i looked the meaning of this words in arabic, and they were the same i though..

Is there any way to debunk this??

Please help!!

Edited September 22, 2016 by Loler

[zapatos]

Is there any way to debunk this??

 

Black holes do not travel at the speed of light.

[Loler]

 

Black holes do not travel at the speed of light.

 

Sorry, I mean that they travel as a speed nearly from speed of light

 

A black hole is just a special kind of star. It can travel a fast as any other star. Most stars move at about 100,000 km/hr. At that rate, it would take 46,000 years to travel 4.3 light years, which is the distance to the closest star.

 

But thanks though, Please try harder to debunk this

Edited September 22, 2016 by Loler

[Phi for All]

Please debunk this..

 

The verse could easily be about solar eclipses, something that was known at the time. This is a much more likely explanation, and doesn't require any supernatural knowledge or prophesy.

[zapatos]

 

But thanks though, Please try harder to debunk this

 

The following...

 

"And black holes are invisible, and they move through space, and their speed is like the light of the speed, So we can say that they run through space, and they sweep"

...is not a valid argument for the assertion that the Quran is referencing black holes.

[Loler]

 

The verse could easily be about solar eclipses, something that was known at the time. This is a much more likely explanation, and doesn't require any supernatural knowledge or prophesy.

But solar eclipses doesn't sweep?

 

The following...

 

"And black holes are invisible, and they move through space, and their speed is like the light of the speed, So we can say that they run through space, and they sweep"

...is not a valid argument for the assertion that the Quran is referencing black holes.

 

 

It's describing black holes, it says that there are things that is invisible, that runs and sweep

 

What could it be referring to? Why can't you guys debunk this claim???Is it really that hard???

[Phi for All]

But solar eclipses doesn't sweep?

The next solar eclipse visible from North America will be a total eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017. It will sweep across the continental United States from Oregon to Georgia.

http://www.space.com/15584-solar-eclipses.html

 

For any two objects in space, a line can be extended from the first through the second. The latter object will block some amount of light being emitted by the former, creating a region of shadow around the axis of the line. Typically these objects are moving with respect to each other and their surroundings, so the resulting shadow will sweep through a region of space, only passing through any particular location in the region for a fixed interval of time. As viewed from such a location, this shadowing event is known as an eclipse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse

 

 

Eclipses are described as being able to "sweep".

[John Cuthber]

"It's describing black holes Time, it says that there are things that is invisible, that runs and sweep"

"It's describing black holes good servants, it says that there are things that is invisible, that runs and sweep"

 

and so on.

There's nothing here to debunk.

 

More importantly, I don't speak or read Arabic but Google translate probably can and it says that

فَلا أُقْسِمُ بالخُنَّسِ الجَوَارِ الكُنَّسِ
means

"I swear Balkhans neighboring synagogues"

Bing tells me it means "So I swear balkhens around synagogues"

and Babelfish says the same

So I rather suspect that the OP is, at best, delusional.

Edited September 22, 2016 by John Cuthber

[Strange]

What could it be referring to? Why can't you guys debunk this claim???Is it really that hard???

 

 

It could be referring to almost anything (but not black holes). And the only reason it is hard is because you are being irrational.

 

So some of the reasons it can't be referring to black holes are: black holes do not have "speed like the light of the speed", black holes do not "sweep" and black holes are not invisible.

 

There are plenty of other things that fit parts of that description. But not black holes.

[Loler]

 

 

It could be referring to almost anything (but not black holes). And the only reason it is hard is because you are being irrational.

 

So some of the reasons it can't be referring to black holes are: black holes do not have "speed like the light of the speed", black holes do not "sweep" and black holes are not invisible.

 

There are plenty of other things that fit parts of that description. But not black holes.

 

 

Yes that's right black holes doesn't have a speed like the light of the speed, sorry for that

 

Black holes are invisible....and they sweep.....Do you even what black holes are? Do some research?

 

What is this?

 

Are you saying that the whole world is wrong about black holes? What is black holes?

 

I see it's really that hard to debunk this...I guess this proves that Islam is the right religion, thanks though for proving me that Islam is the true religion

[ajb]

And black holes are invisible, and they move through space, and their speed is like the light of the speed, ...

Well, neutrinos are very hard to detect, they move through space, and as they are nearly massless they can have relative velocities close to the speed of light.

 

Not that I think that any religious book predicts neutrinos, my point is that with hindsight we can match many things to medieval writings.

 

 

I see it's really that hard to debunk this...

In truth, there is not much to debunk. What you have quoted is not enough to really match with the modern understanding of black holes.

[Strange]

Yes that's right black holes doesn't have a speed like the light of the speed, sorry for that

 

 

So you agree you are wrong one on count. Good.

 

 

Black holes are invisible....and they sweep.....Do you even what black holes are? Do some research?

 

Black holes are not invisible. They cause extreme gravitational lensing and so would be highly visible. They also power quasars and jets which are among the brightest things in the universe.

 

And I have no idea what you mean by "sweep" but there is no reason to think they black holes do it any more than any other objects.

 

 

 

Are you saying that the whole world is wrong about black holes? What is black holes?

 

No, I am saying you are wrong. You are twisting facts to try and make them fit a vague description that could match almost anything.

[Phi for All]

Black holes are invisible....and they sweep.....Do you even what black holes are? Do some research?

 

I think I see the problem here. Sweeping is like the gesture of your arm, or the way the angle of eclipse sweeps darkness across the land.

 

Sweeping is not being used to mean cleaning, like a broom or vacuum cleaner. Black holes don't suck up matter like a vacuum cleaner. They are extremely dense and have an extremely high gravitational pull. Dust and debris fall into them, the way they fall into Earth's gravitational pull, or the sun's.

[qsa]

There are quite few sources for traditional explanation of Quran which are considered to be the "reliable"ones which come from word of mouth of generations after another. One of the important ones is ibn Katheer, and in it the verse is translated to either star or a wild cow!

 

Star as in disappears during the day and appears at night.

 

http://quran.ksu.edu.sa/tafseer/katheer/sura81-aya15.html

 

Some Muslims try to put a scientific spin but other oppose such move.

[John Cuthber]

 

 

Yes that's right black holes doesn't have a speed like the light of the speed, sorry for that

 

Black holes are invisible....and they sweep.....Do you even what black holes are? Do some research?

 

What is this?

 

Are you saying that the whole world is wrong about black holes? What is black holes?

 

I see it's really that hard to debunk this...I guess this proves that Islam is the right religion, thanks though for proving me that Islam is the true religion

Can you explain why your translation is so different from the Google + Bing ones?

[Strange]

But solar eclipses doesn't sweep?

 

 

As part of the definition of a planet is that they "clear the neighbourhood" then planets would have a better chance of matching this description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood

Definitely not black holes though.

[qsa]

Can you explain why your translation is so different from the Google + Bing ones?

 

These are very old words not in use today. As a matter of fact, even 200 years after the birth of Islam when the the Quoran "explanation" was formally being documented by various people they had to resort to old Arabic poetry to figure out the "exact" word meaning/meanings. Google uses contemporary words only and words can have multiple meaning depending on how you pronounce them.

 

It is a bit complicated to go to the exact reason (coupled with above) but you can get some idea with this reference.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics

 

P.S. The translation is not mine but I have quoted the explanation from the original reference that I have posted a link to (it is in Arabic).

 

 

 

As part of the definition of a planet is that they "clear the neighbourhood" then planets would have a better chance of matching this description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood

Definitely not black holes though.

 

 

I have already explained what the words actually mean I come from that part of the world. That is STAR or some minority said COW, you know words can have two meanings( as the song goes).

Edited September 23, 2016 by qsa

[Strange]

I have already explained what the words actually mean I come from that part of the world. That is STAR or some minority said COW, you know words can have to meanings( as the song goes).

 

 

I was just referring to what Loler claims it means.

 

If it is generally accepted to mean a star, then I have no argument with that.

[qsa]

More info on how Quran is explained throughout the ages.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafsir

[Delta1212]

Can you explain why your translation is so different from the Google + Bing ones?

Google/Bing can give you a rough idea of what something means most of the time, but I would not trust them as being overly reliable in any one specific case, especially for non-European languages. They're a supplement to understanding, not a good primary source.

 

Especially, incidentally, for Arabic which has quite a lot of variance by both region and time period. You might as well run Spanish, French and Latin exclusively through the Italian translation setting.

Edited September 23, 2016 by Delta1212

[Strange]

Indeed. There is a linguistics blog I follow that has frequent posts about bizarre machine translations (frequently from Chinese). They usually manage to figure out where the translation came from (Google, Baidu, etc) and even why it gets it so worng.

[Delta1212]

The two best uses I've found for Google translate are, one, translating long passages to get the gist of what they are saying. With individual words, it throws up a single random definition when many words have multiple, often completely unrelated, translations depending on context, and with single sentences are a crapshoot as to whether it'll hit upon the right idea and without larger context it can be difficult to tell whether a given translation is a little awkward or completely broken, and two, writing sentences in another language and then translating them back into English as a sanity check.

 

If a sentence comes out in good English (and you didn't write a word for word translation with English grammar) then you probably wrote a good sentence in the other language. If it comes out garbled in English, you may want to double-check that you didn't get something wrong, or think about rewording it. That last one requires a decent knowledge of how Google translate works with a given language, though, as I've found there are some things in, for example, German that are perfectly natural to say but that it has a difficult time translating properly, and you sometimes need to work around certain words or sentence structures that tend to confuse it.

Edited September 23, 2016 by Delta1212

[John Cuthber]

 

These are very old words not in use today. As a matter of fact, even 200 years after the birth of Islam when the the Quoran "explanation" was formally being documented by various people they had to resort to old Arabic poetry to figure out the "exact" word meaning/meanings. Google uses contemporary words only and words can have multiple meaning depending on how you pronounce them.

 

It is a bit complicated to go to the exact reason (coupled with above) but you can get some idea with this reference.

 

Thanks for that, but if you can not tell if something is talking about invisible sweepers or Balkan synagogues, then how can you possibly tell if it's on about black holes or time?

Is it a real problem with Arabic that you simply can not tell what it means (I'm not unaware that this happens to a degree with English but it's hardly the same magnitude of problem)?

[qsa]

Thanks for that, but if you can not tell if something is talking about invisible sweepers or Balkan synagogues, then how can you possibly tell if it's on about black holes or time?

Is it a real problem with Arabic that you simply can not tell what it means (I'm not unaware that this happens to a degree with English but it's hardly the same magnitude of problem)?

 

I am not sure how you understood my posts, but I will recap. Quran was first written about 1400 years ago, the first written explanation was done about 200 years later. So many words were in disuse already and the authors of the "explanation" had to resort to old Arabic poetry and many other efforts to find the meanings and put them into context.

 

from the link I gave for Tafsir(explanation)

"Arabic literature[edit]

The classical Arabic poetry and the text of the Qur'an are two resources which can be used as foundational reference in ascertaining the meaning and signification of the remaining literal and figurative diction of the Qur'an and its style of expression.^[17] Using Arabic poetry for defining words is a long used practice, in fact there are nearly no scholars who haven’t used this source.^[18]"

^{One of the most important work of explanation is from the 14th centruy scholar Ibn Katheer. the translation given of those verses I have linked to and according to that the word either mean a STAR(the thing that appears at night and disappears during the day), or the minority opinion which said a COW(which hides in the shed and so on).}

So there is no talk about blackholes or anything like that , they explained things in their day and age terms based on what the earlier people have written. Of course, only part of the words appearing in Quran were in disuse (their meaning had to be deduced)the main part is normal classical Arabic which is in use today.

[Delta1212]

Thanks for that, but if you can not tell if something is talking about invisible sweepers or Balkan synagogues, then how can you possibly tell if it's on about black holes or time?

Is it a real problem with Arabic that you simply can not tell what it means (I'm not unaware that this happens to a degree with English but it's hardly the same magnitude of problem)?

Of course it happens to a similar degree in English. There is no way to tell the difference between the act of moving quickly by foot, an enclosure for keeping dogs and a panicked attempt to withdraw funds en masse from a bank except by context, and yet native speakers rarely confuse these meanings because, again, context. That's why using a machine translation as an authoritative source doesn't work. They've gotten better about utilizing context over time, but they still suck at it compared to people and when context is lacking they throw up one result that may or may not be the most likely one.

 

The time period is also entirely possible to use as context. If I tell you the word "gay" appears once in an article written in 2010 and once in an article written in 1920, I think you should be able to figure out the probable meaning for each, which are not the seem, even though no other context has been provided. It's hardly ambiguous.

 

Language changing like that is the reason that so many modern audiences think "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" means "Where are you, Romeo?" instead of expressing despair that he belongs to a rival family.

 

But just because a meaning has become ambiguous or completely opaque in modern usage doesn't mean that people who are familiar with and study older works can't decipher the correct meaning or that it is actually ambiguous. There's not a debate over whether "wherefore" really means "where" or "why."

 

I'm obviously completely on board with the fact that this phrase is not describing black holes in even a "kind of if you squint at it" way, but there are better reasons why this is wrong than the linguistic argument you seem to be trying to make.