What would you feel when you were lying on your back naked in the operation room, surrounded by a large number of complex instruments and monitors and huge dazzling lamps and an army of nurses and doctors actively moving around you, and their head, holding a sharp scalpel, and telling you that he will cut your chest, after anesthesia, and replace in your tired heart a new one?
Often you did not feel anything but a slight fear, and you will mumble some supplications and thank the doctor, and remain silent for your confidence in science as the master of the universes.
It is this science and human curiosity that prompted the West to harness the efforts of thousands of scientists, and spend trillions of dollars over more than half a century in order to reveal the secrets of the universe, so it built the rocket after another, developed the telescope, and did the impossible to satisfy their passion for knowledge.
The philosophy or the fervent spirit behind sending the highly complex and extraordinarily expensive “James Webb” telescope which took tens of years to build and experiment, and millions of working hours from the time of hundreds of distinguished scientists in several countries, is the same spirit that has previously kindled the spirit of questioning in the hearts of eminent scientists such as “Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein” and hundreds of geniuses who challenged the group’s accepted opinion and decided to depart from it, giving humanity a new meaning and dimension.
Since the beginning, man has been trying to understand the secrets of the universe, scrutinizing the sky, observing the stars, questioning the secrets of the universe, doubting intuitions and rejecting the centrality of the Earth, Copernicus and his ideas had the first credit for this, then Galileo came with his two-lens telescope, and changed our thinking about the universe forever.
And in 1990 came the Edwin Hubble telescope, whose lens was 100 inches, and it proved, after observations that lasted for several decades, that space is filled with very many other galaxies, much larger than we thought, and that it is expanding, through the flyaways of galaxies, which means that it was billions of years ago, they came together, and the Big Bang caused them to explode.
I do not know if our eastern mind, a graduate of our public schools can comprehend these words and these numbers.
In the midst of this entire scientific struggle, what have we done? The Egyptian Dar Al-Iftaa issued a million and 386,000 fatwas within a year, and the Kuwaiti preacher, the owner of the red chair, issued a fatwa in which he forbade wearing clothes that bear a cross, and permitted wearing socks that bear a cross, because socks are humiliation.
Note: The beautiful thing about the matter is that James Webb 1906-1992 was not an astronaut, and he did not contribute to the manufacture of a screw in the telescope, which bears his name, but was immortalized, forever for his great role in convincing the Kennedy government to finance space projects.
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By Ahmad alsarraf
