Quran: God is Closer to Us Than Our Jugular Veins

Epigraph:

So were We incapable of the first creation? No indeed! Yet they doubt a second creation. We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––with two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left: he does not utter a single word without an ever-present watcher. (Al Quran 50:15-18)

…

…

…

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD

Is it helpful to think of human consciousness and God’s Providence working in a different dimension from the three dimensions that we generally imagine?

With that in mind, I suggest the Quranic verse above, these videos and a brief description of string theory below.

String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything. 

All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single theoretical roof, where everything that we see is the result of tiny, vibrating strings. Theorists have been working on the idea since the 1960s, and one of the first things they realized is that for the theory to work, there have to be more dimensions than the four we’re used to.

But for the math to work, there have to be more than four dimensions in our universe. This is because our usual space-time doesn’t give the strings enough “room” to vibrate in all the ways they need to in order to fully express themselves as all the varieties of particles in the world. They’re just too constrained.

In other words, the strings don’t just wiggle, they wiggle hyperdimensionally.

Current versions of string theory require 10 dimensions total, while an even more hypothetical über-string theory known as M-theory requires 11. But when we look around the universe, we only ever see the usual three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time. We’re pretty sure that if the universe had more than four dimensions, we would’ve noticed by now.

How can the string theory’s requirement for extra dimensions possibly be reconciled with our everyday experiences in the universe?