We live in a scientific age. Millions of young people study science, thousands of universities teach it and hundreds of publications report it. We even have a cable channel dedicated exclusively to its wonders. We are steeped in technology rooted in your discoveries. But what is science and who was its first practitioner?
Science is the study of the physical world, but it is not just a topic, a topic, a field of interest. It is a discipline, a research system that adheres to a specific methodology, the scientific method. In its basic form, the scientific method consists of seven steps:
1) sighting;
2) statement of a problem or question;
3) formulation of a hypothesis, or a possible answer to the problem or question;
4) test the hypothesis with an experiment;
5) analysis of the results of the experiment;
6) interpretation of the data and formulation of a conclusion;
7) publication of the findings.
One can study phenomena without adhering to the scientific method, of course. The result, however, is not science. It is pseudoscience or junk science.
Throughout history, many people in many parts of the world have studied nature without using the scientific method. Some of the first people to do so were the ancient Greeks. Scholars like Aristotle made many observations about natural phenomena, but they did not test their ideas with experiments. Instead, they linked with logic to support their findings. As a result, they often jumped to the wrong conclusions. Centuries later, the errors of the Greeks were exposed by scholars using the scientific method.
Perhaps the most famous discrediting of Greek beliefs occurred in 1589 when Galileo Galilei challenged Aristotle’s notions of falling bodies. Aristotle had stated that heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies. His argument was logical but unproven. Galileo decided to test Aristotle’s hypothesis, legend has it, by launching cannonballs of different weights from a balcony of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He released the balls simultaneously and found that neither ball ran ahead of the other. Rather, they sped towards the earth together and hit the ground at the same time. Galileo also performed experiments in which he rolled balls of different weights down slopes in an attempt to discover the truth about falling bodies. Because of these and other experiments, Galileo is considered by many to be the first scientist.
However, Galileo was not the first person to perform experiments or to follow the scientific method. European scholars had been conducting experiments for three hundred years, ever since a British-born Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon advocated experimentation in the 13th century. In the fifth part of his magician opus Bacon challenges ancient Greek ideas about vision and includes several experiments with light that include the seven steps of the scientific method.
part five of magician opus However, it is not an original work. It is a summary of a much longer work entitled From Aspectibus (the optics). Bacon follows the organization of From Aspectibus and repeats his experiments step by step, sometimes even word for word. Goal From Aspectibus neither is it an original work. It is the translation of a book written in Arabic entitled Kitab al-Manazir (optics book). Written around 1021, Kitab al-Manazir it predates Roger Bacon’s summary by 250 years. The author of this groundbreaking book was a Muslim scholar named Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.
Born in Basra (located in what is now Iraq) in 965, Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen, wrote more than 200 books and treatises on a wide range of subjects. He was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch of mathematics known as analytic geometry.
Ibn al-Haytham’s use of experimentation was a consequence of his skeptical nature and his Muslim faith. He believed that human beings have flaws and that only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to allow the universe to speak for itself. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” wrote Ibn al-Haytham in Doubts about Ptolemy“but he who suspects his faith in them and questions what he deduces from them, he who submits to argument and demonstration.”
To test his hypothesis that “lights and colors do not mix in air,” for example, Ibn al-Haytham devised the world’s first camera obscura, observed what happened when light rays crossed its opening, and recorded the results. This is just one of dozens of “real demos,” or experiments, contained in Kitab al-Manazir.
By insisting on the use of testable experiments to test hypotheses, Ibn al-Haytham established a new system of inquiry, the scientific method, and earned a place in history as the first scientist.
