January 06, 2009	Tuesday	Muharram 08, 1430

LONDON, Jan 5: A Muslim scientist, Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham, born in AD 965, is said to have made it possible, with his pioneering work in physics, for Isaac Newton to fathom the universe and understand its behaviour.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist himself, presented in his BBC Four programme ‘Science and Islam’ on Monday a fascinating account of the 10th-11th century Arab scientist’s works, uncovering in the process the fact, as he sees it, that in the field of optics Newton “himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who lived 700 years earlier.”

The professor designates the period between 9th and 13th centuries as the Golden Age of Arabian science refuting the popular accounts of the history of science suggesting typically that no major scientific advancements took place in between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance.

He claims that during this golden period great advancements were made in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, chemistry and philosophy.

“He is regarded as the father of the modern scientific method,” asserts the professor, negating the claim that the modern scientific method was not established until the early 17th Century by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

“He is often referred to as the ‘world’s first true scientist’,” the professor claims.

He claims that Al-Haytham was the first scientist to give a correct account of how we see objects.

“He proved experimentally, for instance, that the so-called emission theory (which stated that light from our eyes shines upon the objects we see), which was believed by great thinkers such as Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, was wrong and established the modern idea that we see because light enters our eyes.

“What he also did that no other scientist had tried before was to use mathematics to describe and prove this process.

“So he can be regarded as the very first theoretical physicist, too.

“He is perhaps best known for his invention of the pinhole camera and should be credited with the discovery of the laws of refraction.

“He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours and studied shadows, rainbows and eclipses; and by observing the way sunlight diffracted through the atmosphere, he was able to work out a rather good estimate for the height of the atmosphere, which he found to be around 100km.

“In common with many modern scholars, Ibn-al Haytham badly needed the time and isolation to focus on writing his many treatises, including his great work on optics.

“An unwelcome opportunity was granted him, however, when he was imprisoned in Egypt between 1011 and 1021, having failed a task set him by a caliph in Cairo to help solve the problem of regulating the flooding of the Nile.

“While still in Basra, Ibn al-Haytham had claimed that the Nile’s autumn flood waters could be held by a system of dykes and canals, thereby preserved as reservoirs until the summer’s droughts.

“But on arrival in Cairo, he soon realised that his scheme was utterly impractical from an engineering perspective.

“This promptly led to him being placed under house arrest, thereby granting him 10 years of seclusion in which to work.

“He was only released after the caliph’s death. He returned to Iraq where he composed a further 100 works on a range of subjects in physics and mathematics.”

The professor said while travelling through the Middle East during his filming, he interviewed an expert in Alexandria who showed him recently discovered work by Ibn al-Haytham on astronomy.

It seems Al Hatham had developed what is called celestial mechanics, explaining the orbits of the planets, which was to lead to the eventual work of Europeans like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton.