Manjit Thakur/New Delhi

Way back in the tenth century, Egypt’s ruler was troubled by the frequent foods in the Nile River. He asked a Basra-based science scholar to find a solution to it. The scientist suggested that the flood waters of the Nile could be controlled through puddles and canals; the diverted water could then be used during the summer.

On the request of the Khalifa, the scientist came to Cairo where Khalifa told him that his plan was impractical. Those day, accepting a mistake before the tyrant Khalifa was asking for death; the scientist chose to feign his lunacy.

The Khalifa spared him death and punished him with imprisonment. During his arrest, the scientist got to read a lot.

Ten years later, the Khalifa died and the scientist was freed. He returned to Baghdad. By then he had learnt of many principles of science and become a real scientist.

The scientist was Ibn al- Haitem, who wrote more than 100 books in physics and mathematics during his ten-year detention.

We all know and have been reading that Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists in the world to date, especially his theory of gravity. His principles of Physics remain unchallenged.

Newton is also called the father of modern optics. Newton did his amazing experiments of lenses and prisms in addition to his laws of gravity and dynamics. We all have known about his study of reflection and refraction of light in our school days, and also that when passing through a prism, the light appears in a rainbow of seven colours.

However, Newton has also taken reference from the discoveries of a Muslim scientist for his study of optics. The Muslim scientist’s work was dated more than 700 years before Newton.

According to the history of science, it is said that no particular scientific discovery was made between the heyday of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance of modern Europe occurred. But this is skewed history; doesn’t take into cognizance the developments outside Europe that was passing through a dark age. In fact, in this period, scientific discoveries were being made in the rest of the world.

In the Arabian Peninsula, the period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries can be considered the golden period in scientific discoveries.

During this period, a lot of progress was made in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, chemistry and philosophy

lbn-Hasan ibn al- Haitem was born in Iraq in 965 AD and is considered the father of modern scientific methods.

It is considered that in scientific methods of searching, it is possible to examine phenomena, obtain new information or correct the information already existing or prove it on the basis of data, observations and measurements, rather than to collect their data.

This method of arriving at the scientific fact is credited to Francis Bacon and René Descartes in the 17th century. However, Ibn al-Haitem m was way ahead of them.

On the basis of his emphasis on experimental data, Ibn al- Haitem was the 'first true scientist of the world'. He definitely was the first scientist to explain how we do see things.

He proved through his experiments that the emission hypothesis (which stated that the glare from our eyes falls on the things that we see), propounded by Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, is wrong. Ibn al- Haitem established that we are able to see because light goes inside our eyes. He used mathematical formulas to prove his point. Therefore, he is also called the first theoretical physicist.

But Ibn al- Haitem’s fame is more for his invention of the pinhole camera. This also makes him the first to discover the law of refraction of light. Ibn al- Haitem also discovered the dispersion of light as it’s divided into different colours. Ibn al- Haitem also studied shadows, rainbows and eclipses and he also explained how light deviates from the Earth's atmosphere. He also measured the altitude of the atmosphere almost correctly to about 100 km.

Some observers say that Ibn al-Haitem explained the orbits of the planets, and based on this, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton later theorized the dynamics of the planets.

(This article is part of the World of Knowledge Series)

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