Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim al-Khalili unveils that legacy to fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab and Persian innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance. Inspired by the Koranic injunction to study closely all of God’s works rulers of the Islamic empire funded armies of scholars who gathered Persian Sanskrit and Greek texts in the capital Baghdad and translated them into Arabic the language of the Koran. From the ninth through the four-teenth centuries scholars throughout the empire then built upon those foundations a scientific revolution that gave Europe a similar revolution centuries later. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science were actually the result of the ingenuity of these medieval scholars of the East: Astronomers de-veloped the mathematics used by Copernicus in his he-liocentric model of the solar system; physicians accurately described blood circulation and the inner workings of the eye ages before Europeans solved those mysteries; physi cists made discoveries that laid the foundation for New ton’s theories of optics and gravity But the most significant legacy of Arabic science was its evidence-based approach-the lack of which kept Europeans in the dark throughout the Dark Ages. The father of this experimental approach to science what we call the scientific method was an Iraqi physicist who applied it centuries before Europeans first dabbled in it. Al-Khalili details not only how discovee ies like these were made but also how they changed Euro pean minds and how they were ultimately obscured by later Western versions of the same principles. (SP)