Our Creator has solved every potential problem which living things might experience by creating one optimal solution among every alternative.These perfect solutions open new horizons for men, and they also act as guides in the development of science and technology. The book titled “Engineering in Nature” details many striking examples.1

In recent research, it has been discovered how the thread of a spider can contribute to fiber-optic technology. A crucial challenge in photonic technology is to produce the tiny optic fiber that is used as a conductor for a light beam in nano-scaled optic circuits. Yushan Yan, of the University of California in Riverside, has taken an important step forward in this technology by covering the thread from a spider web with a glass-like material and then removing the thread after the material has hardened. By utilizing this technique, it is possible to produce threads that are 1/50000th the diameter of human hair and that have a radius of 2 nanometers (1 nanometer being one billionth of a meter).

Not only will this discovery be applicable in photonic technology, it will also increase the resolution in optical microscopes, or, alternatively, these threads could be turned into nanoscale test tubes in a new breed of sensors that can suck up single molecules of a particular chemical.

A research group at the University of California cut a thread 1 centimeter long from the web of the giant spider of Madagascar, the Nepila Madagascariensis, and pasted the two ends of the thread to a card. Then they repeatedly dipped this thread into tetraethyl orthoslicate solution. After this, the thread that had undergone this process was dried and heated to a temperature of 420 Celsius. The string decreased by one fifth of its original radius and the process resulted in the production of tiny tubes with a radius of one micrometer.

There are plans to make use of the web of the Stegodyphus Pasifiu-a spider which uses a thread of a radius of 10 nanometers and which is found in the Middle East and Southern Asia. This will enable scientists to use thinner fibers. After heating, a thread with a radius of 2 nanometers is attained. Until this latest finding, it was only possible to produce fibers with an interior radius of 25 nanometers.

Fiber optic researchers do not hide their enthusiasm for this new simple and cheap technology. It is expected that it will be used in the field of supra-molecular chemistry; that is the study of very miniature environments. In these environments the reaction-speeds increase and completely different reactions occur. For such experiments carbon nano-tubes are being used at the present time. The tubes made from fibers obtained from spider webs will enable scientists to create more sensitive environments. It is also thought that it will be possible to create microscopes with a higher resolution by using tinier fiber optic catheters.

Such microscopes would be used to observe events that are shorter in duration than the wavelength of light, yet at the same time, these microscopes would not cause the sample to be harmed. Electron microscopes harm the sample since the features of the technology used necessitate this. Currently, these microscopes use a scope that has been made from very thin glass tubes. These fibers are relatively thick, measuring about 100 nanometers in radius. Yet, by means of this new technology, these new microscopes can be developed and biologists will have brand new opportunities to study events that have not been visible before. Surely, it is not possible to say that the immaculate biological structure and incredibly small thread employed by the spider can be explained by simply putting its creation down to chance or by stating that it is a product of nature.

These perfect examples that can be observed in nature will lead to fundamental changes in our understanding of the universe; they will enable great leaps in terms of making our life more comfortable and, most importantly, they will be helpful in realizing how the Divine Power and Art can be present together and be in harmony.

References 

• M. Sami Polatoz, Tabiatta Muhendislik [Engineering in Nature], Kaynak, Istanbul: 2003.
• Danny Penman, Spiders Weave a Web of Light, New Scientist,
• 22 March 2003, p. 20.

Every soul shall have a taste of death (Quran 3:185). Like everything else, stars live and die. Would it make any difference if you knew that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones had been assembled inside stars? Atoms heavier than iron are formed by rapid nuclear reactions that can only occur when a massive star explodes. Gold, which is not crucial for our lives, and iodine, which is important for our health, are available, thanks to the violent deaths of massive stars.

The death of a star leads to one of three final states. Most stars, including our Sun, will become white dwarfs, stars about the size of the Earth, with no usable fuels. But the most massive stars explode and leave extraordinary objects behind; either a neutron star or a black hole.

The Sun resists its own gravity by generating energy through nuclear fusion. Under extreme conditions, four hydrogen atoms are combined to form a helium atom, and the mass difference between these atoms are converted to energy which can be calculated by Einsteins famous equation, E=mc², where m is the amount of mass converted to energy and c is the speed of light. In 4.5 billion years, the Sun will exhaust the fuel, hydrogen and helium stored in its core. This will start the chain of events that will result in its death. Since it will not be able to generate any energy to balance the huge weight of its outer layers, it will collapse. This will result in an increase in the temperature around its core. This temperature increase in the shell around the core will start new reactions which will produce excess amounts of energy. This extra energy will cause the Sun to expand and become a red giant. Its size will increase to such an extent that it will swallow Mercury and Venus, and maybe even our planet, Earth. As a giant star, it will have a strong solar wind that carries gas into space. Eventually, it will lose its outer layers, and produce a beautiful planetary nebula.¹ Soon the remains of the Sun will collapse and form a very compact object; a white dwarf. Imagine squeezing the Sun into a planet the size of the Earth. Gravity on a white dwarf is 10 million times greater than it is on Earth. Thus, a person weighing 150 pounds will weigh 1.5 billion pounds on a white dwarf. The white dwarf will burn 100 times fainter than our Sun; if the Earth survives the red giant phase, it will fall into a deadly deep freeze, and would not be a pleasant place to live.²

Medium mass stars, like the Sun, die relatively quietly as they exhaust their fuel and form white dwarfs. In contrast, massive stars live spectacular lives and destroy themselves in violent explosions. Massive stars have too great a mass to die as white dwarfs. They consume hydrogen and become red giants, but unlike the medium mass stars, their core temperature is high enough, about 1 billion degrees, to ignite carbon fusion. After they fuse carbon, they burn oxygen, neon, and magnesium to make silicon and sulfur, and then the silicon fuses to make iron. Iron is the most tightly bound of all atomic nuclei. Nuclear fusion is able to produce energy by combining less tightly bound nuclei into a more tightly bound nucleus, but iron is the limit. Once the core of the star has been converted to iron, there are no nuclear reactions that can burn iron and release the energy. Thus, the iron core is a dead end. The iron core sucks energy from the rest of the star. Since the star cannot produce any energy, it cannot resist its own gravity. In a fraction of a second, the star collapses in on itself. The collapsing core of the massive star quickly becomes a neutron star or a black hole. This collapse happens so rapidly that our most powerful computers are unable to predict the details. The envelope of the star collapses and bounces back off the dense core, which triggers a violent supernova explosion that expels the outer layers of the star to form an expanding supernova remnant. This explosion enriches the neighboring media with iron and other metals. If you throw a water balloon at your friend, your friend will get wet. Massive stars are not water balloons, but they are iron, silver, and metal balloons. When they explode, they seed the interstellar medium³ with metals. If there had not been a massive star death near our solar system when the Sun and the Earth were forming, our solar system would be iron-poor, and we would not be living today. Massive stars die so that we might live. The Quranic verse We have sent down iron, with its mighty strength and diverse uses for mankind (57:25) sheds light on this fact 14 centuries before it was discovered. Only in the past century, with the utilization of modern telescopes, have we had evidence of this. Nursi explained the above verse as iron is sent down together with the globe of the Earth from the Supreme Treasury, as a tremendous bounty. That is to say, the thing most necessary for the house of the Earth is iron, for when the All-Glorious Creator separated the Earth from the Sun and sent it down for mankind, He sent down iron together with it, and met most of mankinds needs with it. The All-Wise Quran decrees in a miraculous fashion: Use this iron in your works and try to excavate it and take advantage of it.⁴

A neutron star, on average, is 1.4 times more massive than the Sun, and is compressed to a radius of about 6 miles. Its density is so high that matter is stable only as a fluid of neutrons. An atom is mostly empty space. The nucleus of an atom is very small compared to the size of the atom. If we represent the nucleus of an atom with a blueberry, then the distance between the nucleus and the electrons would be as great as the height of the Empire State building. If you could eliminate the empty space in atoms, you would be able to squeeze stars larger than the Sun into a radius of about 6 miles (the radius of a neutron star). A neutron star spins several times a second, and has a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than that of the Earth. Observational evidence for neutron stars was first found in 1967 when astronomers found a neutron star (pulsar) rotating around itself in 1.3 seconds and sending radio pulses to Earth. If you have a large enough antenna, you can pick up periodic radio signals from pulsars. On Earth, a teaspoon of the material from a neutron star would weigh 100 million tons.

Another scenario for the end product of the death of a massive star is a black hole. When the core of a star contains more than 3 times the mass of the Sun no known force can stop it when it collapses. The object will not stop collapsing when it reaches the size of a white dwarf or a neutron star, because the electrons or neutrons cannot support the weight of the star. The object will collapse to zero radius (or almost zero radius) and form a black hole. Objects need high speeds to be able to leave another object, to be able to resist falling back due to the gravitational pull of the other object. For example, a space shuttle must reach a speed of 11.2 km/s to to be able to leave the gravitational pull of the Earth in order to go into space. Gravity is so strong near black holes that the escape speed from a black hole is greater than the speed of light. Thus, even light cannot escape; this is the reason why these phenomena are called black holes.

As an object collapses, its gravity increases. If it collapses to zero radius, its density and gravity become infinite. Such a point is called a singularity. Clocks slow down near a singularity. If we were able to watch a person falling into a black hole, we would see them moving more slowly as they came closer to the black hole. In fact, the person would never disappear from sight. From where we were standing, this person would fall more and more slowly, until finally they would hardly seem to move at all. Generations later, our grandchildren would be able to look at this friend approaching the black hole, but never crossing the event horizon (the boundary of the black hole). Black holes are not giant vacuum cleaners that will pull in everything in the universe. A black hole has a huge gravity pull, but its force is quite small if you are not near it. If the sun were replaced by a black hole of a similar mass, the orbits of the planets in our solar system would not change at all. The gravity of a black hole becomes extreme only when approached. There are many black holes in the universe, but they do not pose any threat for us as long as we stay away from them. Next time you advise your children to stay away from strangers, remember to tell them to stay away from black holes, as well.

Footnotes

1. A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of gas ejected from a star, and it has nothing to do with planets.
2. Seeds, M.A., Horizons: Exploring the Universe, 2002, Brooks/Cole
3. The gas and dust between stars.
4. Nursi, S., Flashes, Sozler Yayinevi, 28th Flash