Al-Zahrawi's Two Hundred Instruments
A tenth-century surgeon in Cordoba drew and described two hundred tools, from forceps to catgut sutures, many still in use. Rania opens his thirty-volume encyclopaedia and picks the pages that changed…
Ibn al-Haytham Locks Himself in a Dark Room
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Show notes
The experiment in the dark room
Ibn al-Haytham arrived in Cairo promising to regulate the Nile, failed, and spent years under house arrest pretending to be mad. In that time he wrote the Book of Optics, overturning a thousand years of Greek theory with a controlled experiment. This episode follows the argument step by step.
- Why the Greeks thought light left the eye, and why that was reasonable
- The camera obscura experiment and what it actually proved
- The method: hypothesis, test, repeat, which he wrote down explicitly
- How the Latin translation reached Kepler and Roger Bacon
- What is myth and what is documented in his biography
Diagrams of the experiment are on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello, I am Rania Tarawneh and this is Astrolabes and Ink, the show about the scientists of the Islamic golden age and the actual work they did, told plainly, without the myths. I am a physicist from Amman, and I started this series because I was tired of hearing a thousand years of science summarised as the word algebra. Our first subject is Ibn al-Haytham. Around the year 1020 he arrived in Cairo having promised the Caliph he could control the Nile. He could not. To avoid execution he pretended to be mad, and spent years confined to a house. In that house he built a dark room with a pinhole in the wall and used it to prove that light enters the eye rather than leaving it. Today we walk through that experiment, and the method behind it, which he wrote down. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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