SOME OTHER SIGNS OF GOD'S GREATNESS (VERSE NO. 12 - 15)

      Once again, reference is made to some natural phenomenons, in order to show some of God's greatness and to shine the light of faith in the believer's heart moving them on:ِ

      ``It is He who shows you the lightning which causes fear and hope.''

      The scope of God's Grace and Mercy is so vast and extensive that, even in the miseries and misfortunes there can be found again and againe His Mercy and generosity! An instance of this which is mentioned here, is the fearful force and fire of lightning in which there is also the hope of good and abundant crops in the rain which will come out of the clouds among which the lightning flashes.

THE BLESSING OF LIGHTNING AND THUNDERِBOLT

      We know that the lightning flashes is caused by the contact of two pieces of positively and negatively charged clouds; just like the sparking of two hot and cold bare electric wire in contact. When a positively charged piece of cloud, approaches the earth which is negative relative to the cloud, a flash of lightning is created, and it is then dangerous because the earth acts as a negative terminal causing an immense amount of current to flow. There are also many profits for man in the lightning, some of which are as follows:ِ

      1- Man's benefit of irrigation....Due to the great amount of heat that the lightning may cause, a great amount of the air is burnt, serving to reduce the air pressure, and we know that it is the low pressure of air that makes it raining.

      2- The great amount of heat produced by the lightning serves to make heavy water (H2 O2) which is the killer of microbes and remover of the plant infections.

      3- Through the high degree of the created heat, rain droplets will carry carbonic acids, and when they fall upon the earth they fertilize the soil. Then there is the interesting next verse, saying:ِ

      ``And the thunder celebrates His praise, and so do the angels with awe.''

      Some of the philosophers have understood that all the existing particles that make the building blocks of the universe have some sort of wisdom and understanding and all of them intelligently celebrate the praise of their Creator and glorify His name! Rumi too, in his great book (MATHNAVI) has clearly composed that:ِ

      ``All the constituent particles of the world cry out loudly that:ِ we can hear, we can see, and we can speak. We are all endowed with intelligence, but with you strangers we keep quiet.''

      Therefore it is not strange to hear that the thunder bolt too may have some sort of a tongue to celebrate the praise of its Creator.

      In the verse NO.15 we read:ِ

      ``And for Allah prostrates who ever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly....''

      Prostration in this case may mean, being humble and submitting. Some creatures prostrate themselves for Allah, through their nature and by following the natural laws, and some other creatures like the angels, man and Jinns, prostrate themselves before Him according to their creeds and religious laws.

MORE ABOUT THE LIGHTNING

      (One of the most awe-inspiring of all the displays of nature is a blinding flash of lightning followed by the deafening roll of thunder.

      A great deal of what we know about lightning-flashes is due to the work of a South African scientist, Sir BASIL SCHONLAND who took many photographs of lightning, using a special camera with fast moving films. According to what Sir Basil has discovered, lightning is associated with thunder clouds. In the formation of the clouds a mass of warm air moves upward which carry a considerable amount of moisture in the form of water vapour. As the mass rises, it gets cooler and can get less water vapour then it could when it was warmer. Finally the vapour condenses to tiny droplets of water that forms clouds. The water droplets that form in thunder clouds become supercooled, down toِ40³F, which are turned to tiny lumps of ice. Some of the frozen droplets fuse with others to form small hail-stones. These start falling, but continually bump into supercooled droplets moving upward. Billions of such encounters between water droplets and hail-stones produce in the cloud the electrical charge which finally brings about the flashes of lightning. At each encounter with a droplet the hail-stone acquire a negative charge. At the same time a minute splinter of ice cracks off from the water droplet as it freezes and carries a positive charge. As the positively charged splinters rise in the cloud, the negatively charged hail-stones fall towards the bottom, where it is warmer, and so they melt into large drops of water. This process may continue for an hour.

      During this time the whole cloud is a huge dynamo, continuously generating nearly a million of Kilovolt of electricity. It acts too, like a storage battery, with positive terminal at the top, and the negative terminal perhaps several miles below! Between the two there may be a voltage difference of hundred million volts. While the main charging process has been taking place, a smaller packet of positive charge has been built up at the base of the cloud, below the negative pole. Here occurs the triggering action that sets off the lightning flash.

      As lightning strikes; the energy that is liberated, heats the air through which it passes, and the air suddenly expands. The pressure wave travels outward and gives a sensation of sound to anyone that can hear.

      Lightning is sometimes beneficial to man by helping to provide food for growing plants. Plants are in need of nitrogen which is absorbed by the roots, not in pure form, but in nitrogen containing compounds, called nitrates. There is plenty of nitrogen in the air, but it is useless to the plants unless it can be made to combine with other elements to produce the precious nitrates....a difficult task. Now every flash of lightning causes a certain amount of nitrogen in the air to unite with oxygen. After several further steps, the nitrogen is made available to the plant in the form of the nitrates which it can absorb. Lightning accounts for only a comparatively small part of the nitrogen used by plants. Much more is made available by the bacteria found on certain plants, or by nitrate mine from natural deposits, and by man made fertilizers.

      Lightning also causes a great deal of dangers, as a result of heating and expansion, when it passes through wood by which enormous current heats up the part of the wood through which its routes lie and causes it to expand many times. As a result the wood may split.

      When lightning strikes, it may follow a very complicated path. A stroke of lightning once hit a large elm in front of a country house. From the tree it jumped to the house just below the eaves, and went through the wall to an iron bed where on a man was sleeping. By great good luck he was unharmed.

      The principle protection against lightning is the lightning rod which was invented by Benjamine Franklin. It consists of a metal rod extending up from the roof, or some other high point of the building. It is connected by a heavy wire to a metal plate buried in the ground. Thus the lightning will not take a destructive path if it strikes the house.

FROM:ِ FATHOMING THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE'S

FIRE WORKS. BY:ِ JAMES STOKLEY

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE)