Thursday, March 12, 2015

Science and Islam on BBC



*


A truly excellent, and well-done documentary. The early Islamic & Arabic language contributions to the modern world's understanding of the sciences is one of my favorite topics included in the study of the Middle East and of the Arabic language in general.


 Part 1


How Islamic scientists and mathematicians contributed to modern day usage of numbers; the decimal point; the early rise of Baghdad as a cultural center; Islamic political expansion; the purpose of gaining knowledge; Arabic as the common language of the early scientific revolution; the purpose of Arabic vowels; Arabic calligraphy; The Translation Movement where new books were said to have been paid for with their weight in gold; Islamic medicine and its contributions to modern medicine - Galen and the humors, Greek, Indian and Chinese medicine, traditional medicine; The Nur Al-Din hospital; early Islamic understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs; the majlis discussions and debates; Al-Khawarizmi and the combination of Greek mathematical visualizations with Indian mathematic symbols to create Algebra; the contribution of Algebra to everything that has followed in history; how early Islamic synthesis of worldwide ideas of science proved that science transcends political boundaries and religious affiliations.

 *

 Part 2

The scientific renaissance of the medieval Islamic world; the sciences and governing an empire; Medina Al-Zahra' outside Cordoba in Spain; the Nile-o-meter - keeping track of the Nile's yearly floods and using this information for taxation; Al-Ma'mun, map-making, and how mathematics contributed to a better understanding of the circumference of the earth - Al-Biruni and the combination of algebraic and geometric principles to estimate the size of the world; the scientific method and experimentation; the effects of the interaction between crafting traditions and trade with the sophisticated scholarship in the medieval Islamic world; carrier pigeons and their use in trade; mass production; useful alchemy and its eventual development into modern chemistry: industrial-scale soap manufacturing - alkaline substances - glass-making - metallurgy - perfume markets and distillation - weaponry based on petroleum and an improvement on Greek fire - the periodic table - the first classification based on observation vs. philosophy; physics (the science of change): the useable combination of mathematical forms and experimental observation to form a philosophical understanding of real-world change; Ibn Al-Haytham and the scientific method - the modern science of optics - the modern understanding of light and vision - the beginning of understanding physics in a mathematical context and the providing of repeatable experiments - a first explanation of reflection and refraction - the camera obscura - an estimation deduced from these ideas of the thickness of the earth's atmosphere based on the refraction of the sun's rays at twilight.


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