Page 90 - The Miracle in the Atom

THE MIRACLE IN THE ATOM

dinary and tasteless your life would be if you had to eat a single type of food
all your life and drink only water? Therefore, taste and smell, like all other
blessings, are beauties Allah, possessor of infinite grace and bounty, gave
man in return for nothing. The absence of even these two senses alone would
make human life quite dull. In return for all these blessings given to him,

what falls to man is to try to become a person with whom Allah would be
pleased. In compensation for this attitude, his Lord promises him an eternal
life, which is unlimitedly furnished with blessings far superior to those that
are presented to us on the earth as samples of delights to come in the hereaf-
ter. However, the recompense of a life spent ungratefully, heedlessly, and
neglectful of Allah, will certainly be a just one:
And when your Lord announced: "If you are grateful, I will certainly
give you increase, but if you are ungrateful, My punishment is seve-
re." (Surah Ibrahim: 7)

How Do We Perceive Matter?
What we have told so far has revealed that what we call matter is not an
entity having a specific colour, smell and form, as we believed it to be. What
we imagine to be matter, that is our own body, our room, our home, and at
large, the world and the whole universe, is in reality nothing but energy.
What is it then that makes everything around us visible and touchable?
The reason why we perceive the things around us as matter is the colli-
sion of electrons in the orbital shells of atoms with photons, and the atoms'
attracting and repelling each other.
You are not even touching the book that you think you hold in your
hand right now… In truth, the atoms of your hand are repelling the atoms of

the book and you feel a sense of touch depending on the intensity of this re-
pulsion. As we mentioned while talking about the structure of atoms, they
can come close to each other at most as much as the diameter of an atom. Be-
sides, the only atoms that can come this close are those that react with each
other. Therefore, when even atoms of the same substance can by no means
touch each other, it is all the more impossible for us to touch the substance

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