IBN AL-HAYTHAM

IBN AL-HAYTHAM

When we look in to the early physics there was a dominance of the Europeans and the man I am going to explain you is a non-European and was also known as "FATHER OF OPTICS". Can you guess his name.He is none other than Ibn al-Haytham. He is a great polymath who lived during the year 965 to 1040.

In today,s scientific world everything has to be proven . But in the early days this was not the case. The Greeks believed that scientific fact can be discovered through reason, or simply attributed to the actions of the gods. Ibn al-Haytham knew better. He was the first scientist in history to insist that everything be proven through a given method for discovering new information- Which is  a scientific method.

In today's scientific world, the science textbooks  mostly consists of only Galileo, Issac Newton etc. But these scientists stood on the shoulders of this Great man. Without his ideas we many may be still living in a time when superstition will be the basics of science.

HIS DISCOVERIES:

All science textbooks consist of Newton discovered gravity but this is not true. He wrote books about the laws governing the movement of bodies which was later known as Newton’s third law of motion and the attraction between two bodies – gravity. It was only Ibn al-Hathyam books which depicted about gravity and not an apple's story.
He also calculated  the depth of the atmosphere. He studied the basics of calculus  which is the engineering formulas that we are using it today.He completely opposed astrology as a scientific subject, He came to the conclusion that the ideas of astrology were not rooted in any type of science, but in the thoughts and feelings of astrologers.
In his book, The Book of Optics, he was the first to disprove the ancient Greek idea that light comes out of the eye, bounces off objects, and comes back to the eye. He further explored into the way the eye itself works. Using dissections , he was able to begin to explain how light enters the eye, is focused, and is projected to the back of the eye.

PIN-HOLE PRINCIPLE

He is the first to study the phenomenon of the pinhole camera. The same concept was firstly told by him.The concept of a pinhole camera is very simple. A box with a tiny hole on one side is able to project an image of whatever is outside onto a side of the box on the inside.Today also the camera works on this principle only but with the addition of lenses and other certain features. Ibn al-Haytham was able to build these pinhole cameras hundreds of years before the modern development of photography as we know it.
He also studied the way light is affected when moving through a medium such as water or gasses. From this, he was able to explain why the sky changes color at twilight.The translation of The Book of Optics had a huge impact on Europe. From it, later European scholars were able to build the same devices as he did, and understand the way light works. From this, such important things as eyeglasses, magnifying glasses, telescopes, and cameras were developed. He wrote about the mistakes of the Ptolemaic model of how the stars and planets move.

The most amazing fact is that he wrote 200 books out of which there is only 50 books survived till today. Whatever he had discovered we may not also have discovered today.He was not a person who cared for the fame and prestige. The unawareness in today’s world about his contributions is unsettling. When his books were translated into Latin as the Spanish conquered Muslim lands in the Iberian Peninsula, he was not referred to by his name, but rather as “Alhazen”. The practice of changing the names of great Muslim scholars to more European sounding names was common in the European Renaissance, as a means to discredit Muslims and erase their contributions to Christian Europe.
Regardless, of his brilliant mind inspired countless others who stood on his shoulders. It is not a stretch to say that without his research, the modern world of science that we know today would not exist.
Hope my readers gained some knowledge about him and his contributions mean a lot to this modern science. And this post will standstill in my blog and it cannot be erased like the past. Hope everyone knows him.

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