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.