Episode 1In us
~86 billion neurons; memory 'at least a petabyte' (Salk, eLife 2016)
But: Learning, sleep, forgetting; inference after the fact
The 99 Names · Name 19 of 99 · Capacity
الْعَلِيمُal-ʿAlīm
The All-Knowing
Recited as it sounds in the Qur'an, 2:32.
Heard together with: al-ʿAlīm / al-Khabīr / al-Ḥakīm
Start with what we know
Then take away everything it needs. What is left is not a bigger version of us. It is the Name.
Episode 1
Episode 2In nature
Clark's nutcracker: 22,000-33,000 seeds a year in up to 2,500 places, recovers about two-thirds up to 13 months later
Episode 3At our best
LineShine, about 2.198 × 10^18 calculations a second (TOP500 June 2026); IDC datasphere forecast 175 ZB by 2025
But: Knows only what was measured; correlations
Episode 4The Break
Take away learning, time, evidence, storage, forgetting, the line between seen and unseen.
Not more data, but knowledge that was never learned.
From the tradition: Ashʿarī: ʿilm an eternal attribute of meaning. Twelver: 'knowledge was His essence' (al-Kāfī, graded majhūl)
On screen
Holmes knows by noticing what we miss. al-ʿAlīm does not notice; nothing was ever missed.
Where it shows up
- In scripture
- Q 6:59; 2:32; 20:114. 1 Samuel 2:3; Psalm 139; Hebrews 4:13
- The same thread in Jewish and Christian scripture
- Moderate. 1 Samuel 2:3 'the ETERNAL is an all-knowing God'; Psalm 139:1-4; Hebrews 4:13
- In the universe
- ESA Gaia: nearly two billion objects, more than three trillion observations
- In nature
- Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2011, Bruce Hood 'What's in your head?'
- In people
- Teachers; the 'Allāhu aʿlam' habit of scholars
- In science
- Neuroscience and information theory: memory capacity estimates
Watch and listen
Films, documentaries and voices that reach towards this Name. Each links out to where you can watch it.
Sources for this page
gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661; api.quran.com; sefaria.org 1 Sam 2:3, Ps 139; bible-api.com Heb 4:13