Alhazen and the Creation of Modern Science

Science is awesome. People who read my posts know I believe that, and I believe that because it's true.

You know, I think it's really easy to loose track of the countless millions of unsung heroes that contribute to the growth of our knowledge. Even easier is it to forget that geniuses like Newton and Einstein built their successes on top of these countless contributions, and that these came from every level of society and corner of the globe.

So today I want to honor just such a person - the great philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and scientist Alhazen. Alhazen was born in 965 in Basra (located in what is now Iraq). Seeking his fortune, Alhazen moved to Cairo where he gave valuable advice that aided in the city's infrastructure and tutored many of the important people of the period. Also, his contributions to optics are among the most important in the history of the science.

But none of this impressive resume, in my opinion, is what makes Alhazen so worth being remembered. What is noteworthy about him is that he was one of the earliest proponents of a scientific method-like way of going about science. At that point science was as much philosophy as anything else, it was missing much of the rigor and formal analysis that it has today.

Alhazen may be long gone, but his legacy lives on in our world not only in our understanding of it, but in all of the benefits in it that we enjoy.

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please upvote, resteem, and follow!

Other Posts Made Today:
Generation Alpha Centauri - Part 2

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Info Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham, http://discovermagazine.com/2017/may-2017/unsung-heroes