A Millenia of Science
The Earth was at the center of the universe. The movement of the stars above the moon decided the fate of the world below. This was the science of Aristotle.
The scholars of the new Islamic empire, established when the Roman Empire had given way to the Christian Byzantines, began to translate Greek books. They were astonished by the originality of the Greek sciences in measuring and determining the orbit of the stars. Whereas the Christians of that era had been extremely suspicious of such “pagan” texts, the Caliphate had been continuously absorbing books and sciences from Greece, Rome, Persia, India and else where, since the early days of its inception. During this time, the Greek sciences were subject to criticism and development; a process especially highlighted when they became difficult to reconcile with religion.
For example, Islam says that man decides his own destiny, whereas all the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, believed that the movement of stars decided man’s fate (astrology), thus leading to an inevitable clash of ideas. The problem was eventually solved by the abandonment of astrology; the new breed of philosophers were simply observing God’s universe to know Him better, and not to determine the future. However, in spite of a fierce attack from Islamic Jurists, it cannot be denied that some astrologers remained (people love to know their future - so much so, that they are ready to invent it).
Greek science, as a whole, tended to be theoretical. Although very often the philosophical discourses were shaped by experience, philosophers never went back to Nature to verify their assumptions or conclusions. They thought man, being rational and the best of living beings, could understand the universe by thinking.
It didn’t work. Aristotle, for example, assumed that human beings must have the most number of teeth, because man is the best of all the animals. All he had to do was open the mouth of one of his students, do the same to his horse, and start counting; he would have soon realized his error - but he never did.
We cannot decide how the universe “should work”. To learn about the world around us, we must observe it and find out how it “does work”. We can even go one step further, and demand that all the conclusions we draw should be verified by experience. This idea, that all theories must be verified via experimentation (or in other words, must be consistent with our observations), is known as empiricism, and is the principle upon which modern Science (with a capital S) is hinged.
The scientist whose work first reflected this idea was ibn Al-Haitham (or Al-Haytham; 965 – 1039). In his own words:
“the seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration”
Portrait of Al-Haitham on the Iraqi dinar.
In brief, Al-Haitham is credited with “inventing” Science. In less passionate terms, he invented the Scientific Method; and because of that, he is recognised as the first scientist.
And quite a scientist he was. He was the first to experimentally demonstrate that light travels in a straight line. He invented the pin-hole camera, determined the laws of
refraction, and established the field of experimental psychology. In addition, his analysis of the Greek models of the universe led him to conclude that they were inadequate and faulty.
Al Haitham published his most famous book, Optics, around 1015 (the exact year is unknown).
What is really exciting is that we are now approaching a thousand years from the publication of Optics. In other words: we are approaching a Thousand Years of Science, thousand years since Science earned a capital S.
(Logo of 1000 years of science designed by Fara.)
Thank you for your fine essay attention to the important role Islam played in the development of scientific thinking. In my book Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist, the world’s first biography of the eleventh-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen, I point out that the development of the scientific method was a direct outgrowth of Ibn al-Haitham’s faith. He believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to eliminate human opinion and error and allow the universe to speak for itself. As a result of his deep skepticism toward human understanding, Ibn al-Haytham designed the first verifiable physical experiments to test hypotheses.
Thank you very much Bradley, for mentioning the book. And certainly you know better about him, than I do.