Ibn al-Haytham deserves recognition not only as the “father of optics” but also as the first scientist

Bradley has left a new comment on your post "Many of Copernicus' diagrams and calculations were...":

Jim al-Khalili makes some important points. I wrote a similar article a few months ago, here. Not only did Ibn al-Haytham solve the mystery of vision and accurately described the propagation of light, he insisted on systematically testing each of his hypotheses with concrete, physical experiments. For example, to test his hypothesis that "lights and colors do not blend in the air," he used pinhole technology to force light rays to intersect at an aperture, then recorded the results in his massive study of light and vision, Kitāb al-Manāzir (Book of Optics). As the first person to systematically test hypotheses with experiments, Ibn al-Haytham deserves recognition not only as the “father of optics” but also as the first scientist.

If your readers would like to know more about him, I would like to recommend my new book, Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist. Written for young adults, it is the world's first full biography of the eleventh-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen. Posted by Bradley to Savitri Era Open Forum at 4:58 AM, March 18, 2008