Scientific breakthroughs made in the Islamic Age

Submitted by Bader S (United Arab Emirates), Mar 11, 2006 at 18:03

Was not the algebra of Al-Khwarizmi a scientific breakthrough in itself?

Here are a few more breakthroughs

Al-Hazen 965 -1038 is the person who first found the relationship between light source, lens and resultant image. That is why called as "Al-Hazen Theorem". He also explained how an eye can see. He said that we can only see when light falls on that object and reflect back to our eyes.( http://www.historiccamera.com/history1/photo_history1000.html)
Aristotle had believed the eye sent out rays to scan objects, but Alhazen believed the opposite to be true, that light was reflected into the eye from the things one observed, thus overturning a thousand years of scientific thought. His experiment was the first scientific description of the 'camera obscura' (dark room), the principle behind the pinhole camera.(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alhazen.shtml)

Ibn Yunus
"describes 40 planetary conjunctions accurately and 30 lunar eclipses which were used by Simon Newcomb in his lunar theory."
"We can confirm, using modern knowledge of the positions of the planets, that ibn Yunus was exactly right in his description and that the distance of one third of a degree that he gives is again exactly right" (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Yunus.html)

"Ibn Sina discovered many drugs and identified and treated several ailments such as meningitis"
(http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/introduction/woi_knowledge.html#34)

"To this day certain chemical instruments such as the alembic (al-'anbiq) still bear their original Arabic names and the mercury-sulphur theory of Islamic alchemy remains as the foundation of the acid-base theory of chemistry. " (http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/introduction/woi_knowledge.html#34)

If you go to this site http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/introduction/woi_knowledge.html#34 you will be able to get an insight into the contributions of Muslim scholars to world knowledge.

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