LegendaryLife Blog

This is the review of the second episode of the BBC’s Science and Islam: The Language of Science.

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 1

• Islamic scholars realized that everything was based off rules, hence the idea of the Scientific Method was born
• powerful, advanced and wealthy civilizations lead to huge leaps in knowledge
• over a thousand years ago, the Islamic Empire was the largest in the world, governing about 60 million people or 30% of the world’s population at the time
• to give an idea of the size of the Islamic Empire, the Roman Empire would have occupied but a third of the territory
• “The Translation Movement” was funded by the enormous tax revenues collected by the Islamic Empire which sent scholars around the world to gather-up the sum of the world’s knowledge and get it all translated into one language, God’s language, Arabic
• the legacy of the powerful Islamic Empire is spread throughout the Middle East and southern Spain
• in the 8th century, Cairo was under Islamic rule and the first thing they did was try to measure, in the hopes of taming, the mighty river Nile
• they build the Nilometer which allowed scientists to measure, accurately, the level of the river and record it to help discover patterns and seasonal flows

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 2

• by having a precise measure of the river Nile, the rulers now had a precise method of instituting taxes on farmers and warn the citizenry of problems early in the flooding season
• Nilometer is one of the many instruments created to help make sense of the randomness of natural processes
• the idea that you can create stability among chaos is a revelation for the times of Islamic Empire
• one of the Caliphs in the 8th century, was obsessed with maps of all kinds, making precise measurements of the world around him was a passion, which lead to the production of the first world map
• the first world map lead to a fundamental question… how big is the Earth?
• the passion for scientific endeavor continued due to a religious passion to discover everything that the creator had created, the practice is Islam also demanded that its followers have a clear understanding of the world they live in
• as they always need to pray towards Mecca no matter where they are, understanding the curvature and size of Earth was required knowledge
• Islamic scholars figured out that the circumference of the Earth was 24 thousand miles, which is within 4% of the correct value… all by measuring the angle of the Sun in two different places and measuring the distance between those places (by walking and counting your paces).
• the Caliph was pleased but wanted something more accurate so, two centuries later, the size of the Earth was discovered in far more precision

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 3

• the precise circumference of the Earth was discovered, within 200 miles, by using three angles and the height of one mountain along with a simple mathematical formula
• math allows the embracing of the universe
• theory is meaningless without experimentation
• trade was the glue that, along with religion, help keep the Islamic Empire from falling onto itself due to the shier complexity of keeping everything running smoothly across such a vast area
• by the 8th century, the Islamic Empire dominated the world’s trad in both volume and importance
• anything that could be traded, was by the Islamic Empire
• carrier pigeons were used to help spread knowledge around the Empire, between governments, people and even scholars
• by the 7th century, the Islamic Empire was developing the principles of mass production

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 4

• material knowledge was increasingly becoming important to both merchants and armies alike as new ways or making things had to be developed to support an expanded area of use
• the dream to turn base metals into Gold was a project the Islamic scholars poured an incredible amount of time and energy in, the practice of Alchemy had eluded them so far
• the study of Alchemy lead towards developments in the field of Chemistry, which was required in order to develop a common currency across the entire Empire
• coin making turned alchemy into chemistry
• engineers, soap makers and architects all demanded new material innovations in order to turn their concepts into reality
• Europe imported tonnes of soap from Islamic Spain during the 13th century as they didn’t have the knowledge to produce their own
• glass making expanded greatly with the discovery of new materials, they could change the color of glass by using chemicals and were able to build industrial furnaces to manufacture in large quantities, which were used also in tin, tiles and many other building materials
• chemistry was driven by the perfume marketplace as well, distillation was developed as a result to extract ever more complicated base components
• chemistry played a key role in weaponry were the Muslims would attack Catholics using bombs and grenades which struck fear in invading armies

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 5

• the periodic table is the fundamental philosophy of chemistry, it lists all the known elements, grouped in order of similarities
• where the Greeks talked about the classification of elements (Earth, Air, Water, Fire), the Islamic chemists devised a classification that used the scientific observations, this was the foundations of the modern periodic table
• Physics is a Greek word meaning the science of change, the Greeks thought that math could only explain “perfect world and structures” (quantity) while the Islamic scientists realized quite the opposite, math can be used to make sense of the chaos of the world
• Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham thus created a new scientific system that combined the science of change (physics) with quantity (math)
• Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham was considered a genius and was known across the empire
• Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham used his time during house arrest to create the modern science of optics

BBC’s Science and Islam 2: The Empire of Reason Part 6

• Aristotle argued that the essence of an object flows into our eyes while Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham argued that actually, light hits an object and enters our eyes
• in 1020, Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham published his “Book of Optics” to explain the properties of light, this book is full of experiemental observation and describes them in great detail so others can see for themselves
• Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham discoverd the thickness of the atmosphere by looking at how light reflected after the Sun went under the horizon, he got a value of half of the real thickness… which is pretty good considering the technology at the time!

The Bottom Line

The Scientific Method is the single, most important idea behind our modern world

• LegendaryLife Profile: Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham
• BBC’s Science and Islam: The Language of Science (Episode 1)
• BBC’s Science and Islam: The Empire of Reason (Episode 2)
• BBC’s Science and Islam: The Power of Doubt (Episode 3)
• The roots of Modern Science come from Islam!