Until Albert Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ it was known that universe had three dimensions, the great scientist added other dimensions introducing different concepts of space.
Einstein called ‘Time’ the fourth dimension, after the three known dimensions—Height, Width and Length, the dimensions our visual perception can see, though some organism cannot see the dimension of depth, such as lizards and snakes.
What science revealed much later, in fact in 20th century stood already explained in Al-Quran, 14 centuries back, as related in the Holy Verse noted below:
‘’He is the Lord of heavens and earth, all that lies between them; He is the Lord of Easts’’ (37:15)
The heavens may be read as diverse spheres, so is the earth.
The expression between the heavens and the earth relates that meteors, stars can be encountered at various levels of the sky; there are invisible rays which form the basic building blocks of matter and energy.
Earlier lumped together under the generic term ‘Cosmic Rays’ these are today differentiated within the broad categories of nucleons, baryons, leptons and fermions in modern physics, and constitute the subatomic constituents of matter and energy.
They form a gigantic physical balance, as per natural scheme of things.
‘’He is the Lord of Easts’’ runs contrary to other Quranic Verses that mention, ‘’Lord of Easts and Wests’’ however here the expression is limited to ‘’Lord of Easts’’ which denotes merely the direction where the sun rises, also symbolizes the direction in which earth moves around the sun.
While the earth revolves around the sun within the solar system, sun is also revolving around the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy together with its family of planets.
The ‘Milky Way’ in turn is revolving around the central axis of super-galaxy or the local cluster of galaxies to which we belong.
In this way, we are enabled to speak of different Easts; hence Allah (SwT) indeed is ‘Rabb’ul Mashariq’ an idiom denoting plurality of ‘Easts’ in universal order.