Ibn al-Haytham: The First Scientist

With more than a billion-people strong, Islam dignity has been tainted by some of its adherents’ behavior. They hijacked planes, bombed buildings, committed suicidal attacks and killed the innocence. Worse, until now neither a few good men can elevate Islam status. All in all, Islam is experiencing long dark ages.

But for consolation and catharsis, Muslim can evoke sweet memories of the heyday of Islam, when Muslim ruled the world with significant contribution for civilization. One of the remarkable works of Muslim scientists is the invention of scientific way of thinking.

We do agree that modern times owe much to the Greeks. Most of modern scientific, economic and politics concepts hail from this remarkable-but-already-backward society. It was also the Greeks who tried to explain nature “scientifically”.

But, unfortunately Greeks stopped at the theory or argument. Despite they have skills in creating theory, but they fell short of knowing whether the theory is true or not. As a result, they can’t settle problems of competing theories explaining one subject.

To exemplify, they can’t solve the mystery of vision or how we see thing. At that time, there are two competing theories. In the first theory, the light emitted from the eye to the observed object. It was proposed by Euclid and Ptolemy. On the contrary, the second one suggested that the eye received the light from the object. It was put forward by Aristotle.

Then, Muslim scientist got into the brawl.

About a thousand years ago, Ibn al-Haytham (965 – c. 1040) a.k.a. Alhazen gave groundbreaking solution for centuries-long dispute about vision. At this historic juncture, he introduced unprecedented way to solve problem, namely: through experiment.

He invited observers to prove the lights came into our eyes. He asked them to look at the sun, and they felt burning eyes. Therefore, the light simply comes from the object and not vice versa. I wonder the other experiment would be you can’t see any objects in the darkness. Nowadays, it seems very simple account, but it needed centuries to get there from the first human intellectual activity.

Getting the truth from experiment soon caught on with western scientists, as the Arab power started debilitating. The Arab cities in Spain were taken back by Christian Europe. So did the libraries. They translated Muslim works including Ibn al-Haytham’s.

And then Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292), an English philosopher, adhered to his brainchild and fleshed it out.

In “Opus Majus” (1267), he recast the lesson of Ibn al-Haytham that: “Argument does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment”. This is completely the birth of science. And later this way of thinking spread all across the world.

The rest is history. Science-based applications stun and dominate the world. And Ibn al-Haytham’s contribution is still worth remembering.

Source:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/18/magazine/best-idea-eyes-wide-open.html