Article View: sci.physics
Article #8163Re: The Myth of the Muslim origin for the modern decimal counting system.
From: Dan Drake
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:33
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:33
35 lines
2791 bytes
2791 bytes
On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:43:48 UTC, Clint Hunter <ciceroii@rogers.com> wrote: > > Can you name one great Muslim playwright, philosopher, historian, > scientist, musician or artist? One?? You don't want to make it too easy for us, do you? Alhazen, as he used to be called, preferably al-Haytham, who died whn William the Bast^H^H^H^H Conqueror was young, was about the first person to do serious study of optics, and got it right: sight is by means of light entering the eye, not rays projecting from it. You didn't know that people used to get that wrong? Time to learn something, then. The Wikipedia article is pretty hagiographic, but it still has the basic data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen This was 600 years ahead of Johannes Kepler, who gets great credit, and deserves it, for starting the modern science of optics. Alhazen's work is a good candidate for being the only fundamentally new and important work in science in the 1400 years between Ptolemy & Galen on one hand, and Copernicus & Galileo & Kepler on the other. But of course, if you haven't heard of him, that proves he wasn't important. -- Dan Drake dd@dandrake.com http://www.dandrake.com/ porlockjr.blogspot.com
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X-Google-Thread: 10b271,6656b1acbbd73260 X-Google-Thread: fea0e,6656b1acbbd73260 X-Google-Thread: 1037b5,6656b1acbbd73260 X-Google-Thread: fb374,6656b1acbbd73260 X-Google-Thread: 10df0c,6656b1acbbd73260 X-Google-Attributes: gid10b271,gidfea0e,gid1037b5,gidfb374,gid10df0c,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!out03b.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!in01.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!news-xfer.nntp.sonic.net!posts.news.sonic.net!nnrp0.nntp.sonic.net!not-for-mail From: "Dan Drake" <dd@dandrake.com> Reply-To: dd@dandrake.com Message-ID: <vhIsdqY67dTD-pn2-bsvkQxHodN9y@M> Newsgroups: sci.physics,uk.politics.misc,aus.religion.islam,can.politics,aus.politics Subject: Re: The Myth of the Muslim origin for the modern decimal counting system. References: <1184063136.960736.304270@a26g2000pre.googlegroups.com> <4693622f$0$12798$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au> <1184067828.674901.109590@w3g2000hsg.googlegroups.com> User-Agent: ProNews/2 V1.53.cp050 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: 16 Jul 2007 19:33:49 GMT Lines: 35 Organization: Sonic.Net NNTP-Posting-Date: 16 Jul 2007 19:33:49 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 149a84d6.news.sonic.net X-Trace: DXC=L6]e?O?N[[OTA:A;8DQ5^Km4K\QM1CV^@1OYf0H`?;XAZCfikQnYW:NY=Xe6cdI2BEU<THkJVX`]LF30KgOTAoIK X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net X-Original-Bytes: 2504