The original mythbuster
Seven years after the fact, it’s slightly surreal to read post-9/11 responses again. Time makes it easy to forget that everyone in the world had hysteria-inducing levels of adrenaline flowing through their blood for at least a month after the attacks, enough to make even the brightest people believe the proper response to be for the highest civilisation ever to invade all the Arabs and convert them to our way of life. (Surely this seemed tractable at the time.)
Meanwhile, there’s this article over at BBC News about (ahem) Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, a tragically poorly-known, 10th-century scientist whose name the West (for reasons I cannot understand) abbreviated Alhacen. To name only a few of his discoveries, he
- Invented the scientific method, and stressed the importance of demonstration by experiment rather than philosophical argument,
- Showed that incandescent objects radiate light outward in straight lines,
- Discovered various properties of refraction and reflection,
- Argued that the speed of light is very great but finite,
- Invented and explained how the pinhole camera works,
- Learned how to integrate polynomials 700 years before Newton did, and
- Very nearly discovered non-Euclidean geometry.
We may in fact be the highest civilisation ever, but sometimes it’s a good idea to remember which of its parts we borrowed, and how they sprang from such lesser parts of the world.