الْإِسْرَاء
بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
Can a night journey across the heavens be reconciled with a universe where nothing outruns light? This paper puts the Isra and Mi'raj (Qur'an 17:1) to the same test a physicist would apply to any claim of superluminal travel. It separates what the Qur'anic text actually says from later hadith elaboration, closes off every popular "physics already allows faster-than-light" shortcut — quantum entanglement, tunnelling time, cosmological expansion, tachyons — and turns instead to the one place general relativity itself does not forbid an effective faster-than-light transit: the Morris-Thorne traversable wormhole and the Alcubierre warp metric. It derives exactly what exotic matter each would require, and why that matter remains, as of today, physically unrealized. As Fig. 1 shows, the argument compresses into a single image: a crescent-lit night sky opens into a concentric golden portal — the paper's own wormhole-throat geometry, reused as art — pouring a column of light down onto a lone mosque silhouette, standing at the mouth of the very throat the paper spends its pages deriving.
The paper kept two claims deliberately separate. First, ordinary particle- and signal-level physics — entanglement correlations, phase velocity, tunnelling time, cosmological expansion, apparent superluminal jets, tachyons — was surveyed and found, in every case, not to constitute genuine faster-than- c transport; this was presented as a closed, heavily tested question. Second, general relativity itself was shown to behave differently: it does not categorically forbid an effective superluminal transit achieved by curving spacetime, as in the Morris–Thorne wormhole or the Alcubierre warp metric, conditional on a form of matter no known process supplies.
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Can a particle be somewhere else in the universe an instant from now? Feynman's own path-integral formula says yes — sort of. To calculate where a particle is likely to end up, physics sums over EVERY possible path it could take, including ones that reach beyond the edge of what light could cross in that time. Fig. 1 shows exactly this: the blue arrows are the paths that survive inside the light cone, reinforcing each other into the "classical" trajectory you'd expect. The red dotted arrows are the paths that formally exist outside it — nonzero, but so thoroughly self-cancelling that nothing you could ever measure or send a message with makes it across. That one paragraph is the seed of a new paper: "Closed Under What Theory?" — a follow-up to an earlier piece asking whether the Prophet's night journey (Isra and Mi'raj, Qur'an 17:1) could be reconciled with a universe where nothing outraces light. The short version: no particle, signal, or person is shown to travel faster than light here — that's still firmly closed. But whether that door is closed FOREVER, or just closed under today's physics, turns out to be a live question in quantum gravity research (look up "ER=EPR" if you want to fall down a real rabbit hole). Read it, argue with it, tell me where it's wrong.
📖 Read paper.pdf