Ibn al-Haytham, nagovjestitelj moderne znanosti / Ibn al-Haytham, the Harbinger of Modern Science

Abstract

Without the civilizational achievements of the Muslim mind, the rise of the modern West could not have occurred in the familiar format. The powers that directly enabled this rise were unleashed by modern science, and they had long been prepared in the spiritual efforts that had taken place centuries earlier in the philosophy and science of ancient Greece, Hellenism, and especially classical Islamic civilization. The decisive influence of Islamic civilization is nowhere so clear and significant as in natural science and the scientific spirit. The achievements of Muslim scientists in mathematics (algebra, the foundations of geometry, and trigonometry), spherical astronomy, medicine, mechanics, physics, and optics, their new scientific approach, experiment, and inductive method, strongly influenced the formation of Western scientific macro-consciousness and determined the emergence of modern science. Some of the greatest Muslim philosophical and scientific minds, such as Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haysam, and Ibn Rushd, made a particularly significant contribution to this. The paper presents some of the most significant scientific achievements of Ibn al-Haytham, a polymath and probably the greatest scientific mind of the medieval world. His scientific reputation rests mostly on his contributions in the fields of mathematics and physics, that is, geometric and physiological optics, which he established as a special artistic discipline, and on his unique contributions to the foundation of the scientific method. Mathematics becomes the basis of his natural science research; it combines the methods of natural philosophy (physics) and mathematics and introduces the verification of observation when proving the research hypothesis. The paper also presents the main ideas presented in his seven-volume work Kitab al-Manazer (The Book of Optics), the most important work written about light until the appearance of Newton's Optics. This work is at the basis of the development of the science of light as we know it today. In his book, Ibn al-Haytham provides a detailed, rigorous and empirically based explanation of the perception of size, distance and other geometric properties of the three-dimensional world, and imposes a theory of distance perception, which can be considered the first, in the modern sense of the word, a scientific theory of distance perception. In the continuation of the paper, the influence of Ibn al-Haytham on the development of optics and physics in the Middle and Early Modern Ages is discussed.