This page in one paragraph
In Dost, the small takes in what is larger than itself: the heart holds what earth and heaven could not, and the point at the center encompasses the circumference that surrounds it. We looked to see whether physics has anything like this. On this page no row came out that we could call "stand close"; the nearest was the way space and distance do not do the work we expect, set beside the bond between distant particles, and we left it as "greet each other from a distance". The farthest apart are containment in the heart and the holographic idea; there is a shared look, but since one concerns an amount of information and the other the self-disclosure of al-Haqq, we set that pairing aside as "tempting, but we did not make it". We found no counterpart tested by experiment, and coming up empty is also a result. What remains open: if "containing" in Dost is not a matter of size, what is it a matter of, and does the exchange of roles between the encompassing and the encompassed find any place in physics? We did not compare these against the Arabic original; what we read was the site's Turkish section summaries.
What is this form?
This is how our everyday mind knows containers: the larger takes in the smaller, and the smaller cannot take in the larger. A room is bigger than the furniture in it, a glass bigger than the water in it. In Dost's account the opposite often comes: the one that contains fits inside the one contained. A heart takes in what earth and heaven could not.
We could have read this as a beautiful saying, said once. But the same form returns throughout the Futuhat, on very different subjects: the heart and al-Haqq, the point and the circumference, imagination and the two worlds, the exchange of "above" and "below". The 132 hard items we read carried this form. So we looked to see whether the form has a counterpart in physics.
Let us say at the outset: this is the form in which we found the least on this page (Containment, containment). We know of no experimentally tested phenomenon in physics of the kind "the container fits inside the contained". The only thing we found is a theoretical idea; we will say plainly why we did not place it side by side here. Coming up empty is also a result.
What does Dost say?
«Neither My earth nor My heaven could hold Me, but the heart of My believing servant held Me.» (c14k165)
This is a hadith qudsi. Dost opens it up like this: even though God's mercy is vast, it could not hold Him. But God did not count it impossible for the heart of His servant to hold Him. So the measure is not breadth.
Something to notice: "large" and "small" are not used here in the sense of size, yet the sentence is still built as one place taking in another. The heart takes in something that earth and heaven could not exceed.
«In this self-disclosure I saw the small one widen so that the great one could enter. In the meantime the great one had not lost its greatness, nor the small one its smallness. This is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle, and this entering is -not imaginal- but sensory» (c10k129, p. 176)
Dost is describing a moment of self-disclosure. The great enters the small; the small widens, yet neither gives up its own state. The narrator also says this is not imagination, but sensory.
Something to notice: the small does not grow and the great does not shrink. So for "containing" to happen the measures need not change. This is the place that is least like everyday containing.
«For us, bast is a state. The property of its possessor is that he holds everything while nothing holds him» (c9k124, p. 280)
Bast means the heart opening and expanding. Dost describes the possessor of this state like so: he takes in everything, while nothing takes him in.
Something to notice: a single being that "takes in everything but which nothing can take in", the two directions stated at once. For this reason this saying falls under both the containment form and the form in which two opposites are true together.
«Despite its smallness, the point at the center looks with its very essence at all the parts surrounding it … just as the surrounding circumference is the encompasser and the point the encompassed, the reverse is also true. Reflect!» (c1k14)
The point in the middle of a circle looks, in its entirety, at every part around it. The circumference encloses the point, yet at the same time the point encloses the circumference. Dost says "reflect" to the reader.
Something to notice: the encompassing and the encompassed exchange roles. One is inside the other, then the other inside the one. Both directions are stated as true.
«The presence of imagination is the widest of the presences and stations. For the world of imagination brings two worlds together: the world of the unseen and the world of the witnessed» (c11k135, p. 53-54)
Dost describes the station of imagination as the widest place, carrying the unseen and the visible world together. In the same section he also says that the world of the unseen cannot contain the witnessed, because there is no void there. Imagination, though, takes in both sides.
Something to notice: what takes in the two great worlds at once is not one of them but a station between the two. Who the container is does not become clear at once in this sentence.
«The truth of the matter is that al-Haqq is the very forms. For just as a place cannot hold God, a form too does not conceal itself.» (c13k150, p. 195)
Here Dost says that a place cannot hold God. What takes up no place therefore cannot be sought in a direction either. In other sections he also writes that what is called "indiyya" or "with" is not a place but a relation.
Something to notice: in Dost the question "where" does not work in many places. Words like direction, distance and "with" do not describe a place. For this reason the matter of containment should not be read as a matter of a box in space.
What is there in physics?
Almost only two areas came up here. The first is the question "how much information fits into a region?" and the holographic answer given to it. The second is the bond between two particles far from each other. We describe the two separately.
't Hooft 1993 — Dimensional reduction in quantum gravity
How much information can be stored in a room? Calculations on black holes suggest that the information that can be stored in a region is proportional not to its volume but to the area of its boundary surface. From this 't Hooft proposes the following: a three-dimensional content can be described completely by the information on a surface with one dimension fewer. This is the beginning of what would later be called the holographic principle. What is certain is the black hole entropy calculations; the proposal is an expectation and an interpretation. It has not been tested by experiment. ['t Hooft 1993]
Susskind 1995 — The world as a hologram
Susskind gathers the same idea and sketches a first, informal picture. The question is: if we think quantum theory and gravity together, how much information can be stored in a region? The answer given is that the three-dimensional world can be described exactly by information written on a surface; each small piece of the surface carries just one discrete degree of freedom. The author also discusses string theory as a possible candidate for this. This is a theory paper, with no experiment. What stops one is the thought that the information of what we call "volume" cannot exceed that of the surface. How this holds in the real universe is open. [Susskind 1995]
Bousso 2002 — The holographic principle
This is a review article. Bousso explains that the information a region of space can carry depends not on its volume but on the area of the surface enclosing it. According to the article the bound is about 1.4 times 10 to the power 69 bits per square meter. The author works through how this bound was found, the role of black holes here, and to which regions the bound can be applied; he also says it has been tested in many examples. But the author himself notes that the reason for this relation between geometry and information has not yet been explained. The holographic principle looks for this reason in the degrees of freedom of a unified theory; this is a proposal, not a measurement. [Bousso 2002]
Maldacena 1997 — A theory on the surface, gravity in the depth
Physics has two great frameworks: the quantum physics of particles and Einstein's gravity. Uniting the two is an unsolved question. Maldacena proposes that a certain kind of quantum field theory (with many components and high symmetry) can carry the same information as a gravitational string theory in a curved spacetime with one more dimension. That is, a description without gravity on the surface may be equivalent to a description with gravity in the depth. The article puts this forward as a conjecture and brings arguments from string theory. It has passed many mathematical tests and is widely used; but whether it is true for our own universe is a separate question. [Maldacena 1997]
Bell 1964 — Is a local hidden order possible?
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen had asked in 1935: is quantum theory incomplete, is there something that is definite even before measurement? Bell made this question testable. Suppose we measure two connected particles in distant places. If there is a "local" hidden order that determines the results in advance and is not influenced from afar, the relation between the two measurements cannot exceed a certain limit. Bell wrote this limit as an inequality. The prediction of quantum theory exceeds this limit in some settings, and later experiments matched the quantum prediction. What has to be given up is still debated: locality, or predetermination. [Bell 1964]
Looking side by side
Containment in the heart, the great entering the small, and the holographic idea. We set this pair aside as "tempting, but we did not make it".
What is shared: in both places a region seems to carry more than we expected. In Dost the heart takes in what earth and heaven could not. In the holographic idea it is the surface, not the volume, that decides ['t Hooft 1993; Susskind 1995; Bousso 2002; Maldacena 1997].
Where they part: in holography the information of the surface is enough to describe the three-dimensional information inside completely; in Dost the heart is not compared as a place, it is spoken of in terms of relation. The holographic principle is a theoretical proposal, not tested by experiment. And "containing" is not the same verb on the two sides: one is an amount of information, the other the self-disclosure of al-Haqq. The resemblance of the word alone was not enough for us to make this pairing.
Where someone who sees might notice: if someone sees a kinship between the sentence "the boundary describes the content completely" and Dost's "the circumference encloses the point, the point the circumference", it would be worth taking up in a separate piece. We did not see it.
Open question: beyond the resemblance of words, is there a kinship of form between the surface-content relation and the exchange of roles between encompassing and encompassed?
The non-working of place, direction and "with", and the bond of distant particles. We left this as "greet each other from a distance".
What is shared: in both places distance does not do the work we expect. In Dost a place does not hold God, and "indiyya" is a relation, not a place. In physics, however far apart two particles are, the measurement results can come out in agreement; in principle distance does not reduce this agreement [Bell 1964; SEP: Quantum Entanglement and Information]. In practice, keeping entanglement over long distances is hard and experiments are built with great care for that reason; we did not use a source describing this difficulty on this page.
Where they part: in physics space is well defined, the measurement is made in space, and the correlation is measured in that space. Also, it is not possible to send a message far away through this bond. In Dost, the very notion of place does not work. One says "distance makes no difference", the other "there is no such measure as distance".
Someone who sees could look at how the sentence "far and near do not stay the same thing" is built on the two sides; we could not see further than that.
Open question: do the non-reduction of correlation by distance in physics and the complete non-working of place in Dost fall under the same form of the unthinkable, or are they just two different astonishing phenomena?
The human and the cosmos, part and whole. Rather than "we did not look at this door", let us show this group of items as placed elsewhere: it was taken up on the page of the Wholeness form. What is looked at there is that a part cannot be defined apart from the whole.
Being and non-being, knowledge, breath; the unity of opposites. These fell closer to the Both-and form and were taken up there.
The infinite, the finite, measure and equivalence; imagination and embodiment, imagination and barzakh. We did not look at this door. The dimension of Hilbert space (the abstract mathematical space in which quantum states live) is not a spatial breadth; "containing" here would be something else. The fact that imagination and the barzakh take in two worlds at once was dealt with in a separate study on barzakh and imagination; there too we found no counterpart at the level of experiment or theory.
Questions we are left with
- The form "the small container takes in the large content" did not come up anywhere in physics that has been tested by experiment; it exists only in theoretical holography. Is this gap itself a finding?
- That this form, so crowded in Dost (132 items), finds so few counterparts in physics: does it show that the two sides truly part in this direction, or are we not looking in the right place?
- If "containing" in Dost is not a matter of size, what is it a matter of? To read this better than the text itself, whom should we ask?
- To which relation in physics can the encompassing that exchanges places between the circumference and the point be compared? Or is there no such relation?
What did we not do?
We did not compare Dost's words with the Arabic original. What we read were the site's Turkish section summaries; the quotations were taken from those texts word for word, but were not tested against the Arabic or the translation's original. For this reason we do not know how much room a verb like "to contain" takes up in Arabic.
This page is not a reading summary; it is our reading framework, and we leave every row as a question. We do not understand Dost, but we do not give up trying to understand.