How Digital Scans Are Helping Kids Get Faster Dental Care

Schulz-Weidner, N., Schraml, E.M., Frodermann, T. et al. Comparison of dental findings between dentists and pediatricians using intraoral scan-based teledentistry in children. Scientific Reports, September 2025.

A new study in Germany shows that “teledentistry” (using digital mouth scans to check children’s teeth) can be just as effective as a traditional in-person exam. Researchers wanted to test whether pediatricians, who are usually not dental specialists, could spot dental problems using intraoral scans (a special camera that creates a 3D image of teeth) and decide when kids need treatment. The study included 70 participants aged 4-17. Each child had a regular dental check-up and then had their mouth scanned with an intraoral scan. These scans were later reviewed by a pediatrician, who received basic training on children’s dental health, and a dentist. The researchers compared what they found to the in-person dental exams and found promising results. Both the pediatrician and the dentist were able to identify cavities, tooth defects, and urgent dental needs almost as well as the in-person checkups. Pediatricians were nearly as accurate as dentists in deciding whether a child needed quick dental care. However, dentists were still better at spotting detailed issues like the exact type of tooth fillings, but this did not affect treatment decisions in most cases. The results show that there is no significant difference between digital teledental findings and in-person exams. This study proves that with some basic training, pediatricians can play a key role in early dental screening, especially in areas where dentists are hard to reach. Non-dental professionals can now be more involved in early oral health assessments. Using this method means fewer missed problems, faster treatment, and healthier smiles for children.

What Lies Beneath The Outer Layers Of A Star?

Schulze, Steve, Avishay Gal-Yam, Luc Dessart, Adam A. Miller, Stan E. Woosley, Yi Yang, Mattia Bulla, et al. “Extremely Stripped Supernova Reveals a Silicon and Sulfur Formation Site.” Nature News, August 20, 2025.

Astronomers captured a rare glimpse inside a star as it exploded, revealing what lies beneath its outer layers. Dr. Steve Schulze and his team observed a supernova, SN 2021-yfj, unlike any seen before. Schulze explains that stars are like giant cosmic onions: hydrogen on the outside, then helium, carbon, oxygen, silicon, and finally the iron core. Normally, we only see the outer layers during a star’s death, but this star had already shed nearly all of its shells before it exploded. That allowed scientists to look much deeper into its structure and confirm long-standing predictions that the inner core has an oxygen-silicon shell.

One of the most surprising findings was the presence of helium. Helium is an element that should have been burned away at a much earlier stage of the star’s life. This discovery has left scientists puzzled and is challenging existing models of stellar evolution and supernova explosions.

Researchers believe the star was originally extremely massive—about 60 times the mass of our Sun—and likely lost much of its material over thousands of years through a process called “pair-instability,” where repeated pulses of energy blew away outer layers before the final explosion.

Schulze says the next step is to find more stars like this to understand whether 2021-YFJ represents a new class of supernovae. This discovery may even lead to a “gold rush” as astronomers search for other missing links in the life cycles of stars.

How Sleep Cycles Impact Our Health

Minami, Y., Kishi, A. & Ueda, H.R. Preventive circadian medicine: improving health with sleep checkups. npj Biological Timing and Sleep, September 2025

A new study investigates how a single night of shifting the sleep-wake cycle impacts glucose metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and hunger signals in healthy young adults. Sixteen men and women took part in a highly controlled lab experiment. They followed a sleep schedule for several nights before the test. On the test day, they shifted their sleep-wake cycle by 12 hours to simulate a night shift. They stayed awake all night and slept during the day. Results showed significantly higher blood glucose levels and a reduction in insulin sensitivity, despite participants having identical food intake. The test also caused ghrelin (hunger hormone) to increase, leading to stronger feelings of hunger, while leptin (satiety hormone) decreased, which could lead to eating more than usual. Participants also reported stronger cravings for high-calorie foods like sweets and snacks. Even a single night of circadian misalignment is enough to cause noticeable metabolic disturbances. These hormonal changes may lead to overeating, which, over time, could result in weight gain and insulin resistance if the circadian disruption becomes chronic. This study helps explain why night shift workers and those with irregular sleep patterns have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic diseases. Staying awake all night and sleeping during the day even once significantly disrupts glucose metabolism and boosts hunger signals. Repeating this cycle regularly increases the risk of obesity and diabetes. The findings highlight the importance of stable sleep-wake cycles for maintaining metabolic health and suggest that strategies to reduce circadian disruption could benefit public health.

The solar system consists of planets, dozens of moons, and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteors revolving around the Sun at its center. Along with all these celestial bodies revolving it, the Sun turns around the Milky Way. This movement model is called the spiral model.

The planets in the solar system, based on their proximity to the Sun, are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars (terrestrial planets), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (Jovian planets), and Pluto (if accepted as a planet). The terrestrial planets are closer to the Sun. They are smaller and denser than Jovian planets. They have rocky surfaces and their cores are molten. Venus, Earth, and Mars have atmospheres. Mercury, on the other hand, does not have an atmosphere, as its surface gravity is not enough to keep atmospheric gases around the planet. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, but the surface temperatures on Venus are significantly higher compared to Mercury due to its dense atmosphere (also known as the greenhouse effect). For this reason, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system.

Jovian planets are larger than terrestrial planets. They consist mainly of gases, and they have lower densities and do not have rocky surfaces. They have a small, liquid and solid core. Their atmospheres consist of the same elements as the terrestrial planets. The density of Saturn is 0.687 gram per cubic centimeter. This makes it the only planet in the solar system with a density less than water. Neptune and Uranus are the coldest ice giants of our solar system.

Pluto is small and cold, and it is hard to observe. It consists of ice and rocks and has a thin atmosphere and a very low gravity.

As is seen, although they are assumed to have formed from the same nebular dust, each planet is unique manifesting magnificent beauty.

The Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of the total mass of the solar system. All other celestial bodies combined (planets, asteroids, satellites, meteors, etc.) make for only 0.14 percent of mass. This is similar to the fact that about 99.9 percent of an atom’s mass belongs to the nucleus and 0.1 percent is coming from the electrons. The Sun is approximately 333,000 times heavier than Earth. It is so large that it can house approximately 1.3 million Earths inside it [1]. However, the Sun is a medium-sized star compared to hundreds of thousands of stars in the Milky Way.

The Sun’s mass is 27 million times greater than that of the Earth’s moon [2]. During a total eclipse of the Sun, the moon moves in between the Sun and Earth. The moon’s diameter is approximately 400 times smaller than the Sun’s, and the moon is approximately 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun [3]. The moon’s perfect positioning makes a total eclipse possible.

Distances and dimensions in the universe are so huge that astronomers use special units to define distances in space. Commonly used units for space include astronomical units (AU), light years, and parsecs.

An astronomical unit is the average distance of Earth from the Sun. Earth’s orbit is elliptical, and the Sun is not properly at its center. The minimum distance between Earth and the Sun is approximately 147 million km, and the maximum distance is approximately 152 million km along the semi major axis. The average of these distances is called 1 AU and equals approximately 149.6 million km [4].

One light year is the distance light can travel in space in one year, and it is calculated as 9.46 trillion km. The speed of light in a void is around 300,000 km per second (299,792,458 km/s). 1 parsec is approximately 3.26 light years.

The distances of planets to the Sun are not random. They seem to follow a mathematical sequence called Bode’s sequence. This sequence was first announced by German astronomer Johann Daniel Titius, in 1766. The sequence, popularized later by J. E. Bode in 1772, became very popular among the astronomical community as it held true for the distances of six planets – all that were known at that time – from the Sun [5]. The planets were found to conform considerably to this sequence. This sequence became all the more important with the discovery of Uranus, in 1781, as this sequence predicted the distance of Uranus from the Sun. Bode’s sequence starts with 0, followed by 3, and then, the next number is the twice the previous number.

0;    3;    6;    12;    24;    48;    96;    192;    384; …

Actual distances of planets from the Sun:

To adapt this sequence to the distances of planets from the Sun, Bode added 4 to these numbers before dividing them by 10. These changes do not break the original sequence. Adding 4 to the numbers of Bode’s sequence:

0+4=4;    3+4=7;    6+4=10;    12+4=16;    24+4=28;    48+4=52;    96+4=100;    192+4=196;    384+4=388

and then, dividing them by 10, we get:

0.4;    0.7;    1;    1.6;    2.8;    5.2;    10;    19.6;    38.8 (AU).

Looking again at the distances of planets from the Sun, we see that these distances are very much like the numbers calculated by Bode:

This sequence suggests that there should be a planet at a distance of 2.8 AU from the Sun, but there is none. However, there is the asteroid belt (between 2.2 AU and 3.2 AU) at this position. Bode’s law led to the discovery of the asteroids as a result of a search for a planet between Mars and Jupiter. The largest astronomical object at a distance of 2.7 AU from the Sun is Ceres. Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres has a width that is the half of the moon’s, but its mass is 1 percent of the moon’s. That is, it has a very low density. It is the largest asteroid in the solar system and has a round shape thanks to its gravity. Many astronomical sources refer to Ceres as a dwarf planet.

Neptune is the only planet that does not conform to Bode’s sequence.

As seen, the planets are not randomly lined up around the Sun. It is not a coincidence that these planets are positioned like beads of a rosary according to a special mathematical formula.

References

1. How large is the Sun compared to Earth? | Cool Cosmos (caltech.edu)
2. Currents: NOAA’s National Ocean Service Education
3. Why do the sun and moon seem like the same size? | Space | EarthSky
4. Solar System Math (nasa.gov)
5. Bode’s law – Oxford Reference

Formula One (F1) auto racing, organized by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, [1] consists of a series of races held in specially built circuits in different countries. Drivers and teams are evaluated based on the total points they scored at the end of each season.

Michael Schumacher, who suffered a severe brain injury in a skiing accident in 2013, has a joint-record seven World Drivers’ Championship titles. In today’s F1 races the maximum speed is nearly 400 km/h and Lewis Hamilton holds the record of average speed of 264.4 km/h throughout the race.

Unless you are a Formula 1 driver, the maximum speed you can reach is 200-220 km/h in a car, an average speed of 300 km/h on a high-speed train, or approximately 1,200 km/h on a plane.

The truth is we are already moving with a much higher speed on a much faster vehicle, which we call the planet Earth. When calculated at the Equator, Earth rotates around its own axis with an approximate speed of 1,669 km/h. It may sound scary when you image the world is spinning at such a high speed, but we do not get dizzy or lose our balance and fall because of it.

The Earth’s speed is much faster on its journey around the Sun, which is an approximate of 107,000 km/h. This is about 40 times faster than the speed of a bullet. Despite this seemingly alarming speed, how come can we continue our lives without feeling anything? The gravitational force is the agent assigned to ensure our safety in this matter. The fact that we are moving at the same speed with the world encapsulated in the atmosphere is like being on board a plane midair, and in both cases we can freely move unaffected by the speed of the “vehicle” we are in.

Our world is a part of a dynamic universe wherein everything moves in orderly fashion – just as implied in the word “cosmos,” which etymologically means “order.” Earth is a jewel of this wondrous system that moves in harmony with other celestial bodies that move at different and great speeds like stars.

The Earth does not only rotate on its axis and revolves around the Sun, but it also moves with the Solar System, which in turns moves with the Milky Way, which already has its own movements and rotations.

All of this speed may seem overwhelming to some, but it is impossible to slow down or speed up this mechanism. Billions of celestial bodies act in a specially designed system that if they do not move with their current speeds, many problems would arise one after another.

Suppose that Earth’s speed of rotation around its own axis is increased by 1 km/h. According to a study by Witold Fraczek from the University of Wisconsin, if this would ever happen [2] then we could expect the following things:

As the speed increases water would migrate from the poles to the equator and the sea around the equator would start to surge. This change would affect the tide in the oceans thus causing further alternations in the ecosystem and the order of life.

The increased speed would also cause the centrifugal force generated by Earth’s rotation to go up, disrupting the balance between it and the gravitational force that counters it. If Earth’s rotational speed increased to 27,000 km/h the centrifugal force would be equal to the gravitational force on the equator. This means that the gravitation would be effectively canceled out and the system is disrupted and the life on Earth would come to an end. For instance, the water in the oceans and seas would move toward the atmosphere.

Increased rotational speed would result in stronger winds and hurricanes. Stronger hurricanes would have more destructive effects. Earth’s rotation is one of the causes of wind formation. If Earth was not moving at all, the winds from the North Pole would directly blow toward the equator (or vice versa). However, Earth’s rotation ensures that winds are deflected eastward, which is one of the reasons why winds or hurricanes ever occur.

Another effect would be on Earth’s crust as it would slowly flatten out at the poles and bulging around the equator. This would in turn trigger the movement of tectonic plates, resulting in more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

All of these changes and upheavals would be greater in proportion to the increase in Earth’s rotational speed.

In our final analysis we are like microscopic living beings on a basketball spinning around its axis with a speed 40 times that of a bullet.

Today, scientists believe that Earth was spinning at a greater speed some 4.4 billion years ago when a huge celestial body crashed into Earth and the moon was formed thus giving our planet its current shape and speed.

If this theory is true, then this collision had been so precise that even a deviation of 1 in 1,669 (Earth speed of rotation on its own axis in km) would have caused disorder and disruption in this macro system. These amazing events can hardly be explained if all these complexities were to be dependent on blind chance or the non-existent will of these celestial beings. If we choose to rely on chance for an explanation, then we would be living with fear as people had once feared that Halley’s Comet could crash into Earth. Scientists say that there are approximately 2 billion stars in our galaxy. Yet, the distance of Halley’s Comet to Earth was 35 times the distance of the Sun to Earth, i.e., approximately 1.5 million km.

Notes

1. https://www.fia.com
2. https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Witold-Fraczek-35661189

REFERENCE

1. https://www.popsci.com/earth-spin-faster

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Immanuel Kant

Since the very beginning, humankind has been probing the universe and standing in awe as we learned more and more about it, thus increasing our curiosity even more. Each discovery has revealed how little we collectively knew and has helped to showcase the marvelous creation of the universe.

In December 2019, the Daniel K. Inouye Telescope (DKIST), the world’s largest solar telescope, started capturing the highest-resolution images of the Sun that were ever taken. The motion on the surface of the Sun was observed in detail, and the magnificent image of millions of solar flares, each much larger and more effective than any volcanic eruption on Earth, enthralled scientists.

With its myriad of features such as its location, size, energy, and structure, the Sun is an indispensable resource for Earth. This source of heat and light was most likely created approximately 4.6 billion years ago to set the Earth ready for all the living things that were going to come much later.

It is a known fact that the Sun has a major role among all causes on which all life on Earth is dependent on. In fact, this is exactly what makes the Sun unique, or else it is just one of the billions of stars in the Milky Way. For instance, there would be no plants since photosynthesis is triggered by energy from the Sun. Processes that are crucial to the maintenance of the environment, such as water circulation, i.e. evaporation of water from the seas and oceans and its downpour elsewhere would not be possible. Winds would also not occur as they are caused by differing temperatures in the atmosphere. Without the Sun as the apparent cause of many vital processes, seasons would not emerge in the world, nor would the formation of vitamin D in our bodies would be possible. Of course, all of these phenomena are within the frame of the laws of creation, and our Lord can also create without cause or reason.

Location and size

While the Sun is 26 thousand light years far from the center of the Milky Way, its distance from the planet Earth is about 150 million km, which equals 8 minutes and 31 seconds at the speed of light. In other words, we are unable to watch the Sun live but can witness how it looked 8 minutes ago.

The Sun, normally a white, medium-sized star, appears yellow due to the Earth’s atmosphere. It is comprised of 91% hydrogen, 8.9% helium, 0.1% carbon, and other elements such as nitrogen. It is one of the stars we otherwise see during a clear night sky.

While the Sun is enormous in comparison to the size of Earth, it is a relatively small celestial object when compared to the size of the Universe. Our solar system consists of eight planets, several moons, numerous asteroids, and the Sun. The Sun, the heaviest and largest celestial body in the system, is 600 times larger than the total volume of all of the system’s planets. Equaling 99.8% of the total weight of its system, the Sun definitely generates a huge gravitational force which causes the other celestial objects to orbit itself. There is a perfect balance between the gravitational force of the Sun and the centrifugal force of the planets. If the rotational speeds of the planets were slower, they would quickly be pulled towards the Sun and consumed.

The Sun is a huge ball of flame with the temperatures of 5-6 thousand degrees Celsius on its outermost shell and 15-16 million degrees Celsius at its core. Its surface is in perpetual motion due to the convective movements triggered by the heat from its core [1]. Due to consecutive explosions and stirs that result in a kind of “plasma soup,” there is no fixed temperature on the Sun. The concentration of the surface magnetic field in certain regions prevents a purely homogeneous heat distribution. This is how the “sunspots” – dark-colored areas on the Sun’s surface – are formed.

Movements of the Sun

“And the sun runs the course appointed for it for a term.” (The Qur’an, 36:38)

As stated in the Holy Qur’an, the Sun moves on an orbit. While the Sun rotates around itself, it also travels towards Vega, a star 25 light-years from the Earth, at a speed of 220 km per second. The Sun completes a tour of the galaxy in about 230 million years.

The Sun rotates around itself at an average of 70 thousand km. Since it is in plasma form, the Sun moves at different speeds in different regions. The equator region completes one cycle in 25 days, while one cycle of the pole regions takes 35 days. The interior of the Sun is extremely volatile: A French research group led by Prof. Laurent Gizon examined the seismic sound waves in the Sun and discovered that the core of the Sun rotates 3-4 times faster than its other regions [2].

Similar to that of the Earth, the Sun has magnetic north and south poles that are in perpetual motion. These poles shift places every 11 years.

Reactions in the Sun

It is estimated that the hydrogen fuel of the Sun, which is counted among the middle-aged stars, will end after 6.5 billion years and thus send it to an utter collapse within itself which will result in it becoming a small star called a “white dwarf.”

The central region of the Sun undergoes intense pressures due to gravitational force. These pressures cause nuclear fusions and the energy produced through radioactive reactions in the Sun reaches to the Earth as light and heat. Every second, 564 million tons of hydrogen turns into helium, while approximately 4.5 million tons of material turn into energy and radiates into space.

Simply put, there are 400 billion 1-megaton strong nuclear explosions happening at any moment in the Sun. Moreover, the energy the Sun produces in one second is 6.1 million times more than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Only one in 2.2 billion of the energy the Sun emits in space reaches the Earth and ends up catering to the needs of living beings.

Mercy rather than disaster

Particles that escape from the corona layer of the Sun, which perpetually moves with nuclear explosions with a temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, are dispersed into space. This wind of charged particles is emitted from the Sun in every direction at a blazing speed of 400 meters per second. This magnetic breeze called “Solar Wind” impacts the magnetic field of the Earth and causes storms in the magnetosphere layer of the atmosphere.

Fortunately, our planet Earth is protected by a magnetic shield, which deflects these harmful rays from the Sun to the polar regions.

The magnificent view of the polar lights of blue, red and green colors called “aura” in both poles is caused by the collision of the magnetic field waves from the Sun with the Earth’s atmosphere. This wonderful natural light show mostly takes place at the poles because the north and the south poles are the zero points of the Earth’s magnetic attraction where charged particles intensely enter the atmosphere.

Unexplained force

Large enough to house 1 million and 300 thousand Earths in itself, the Sun works like a giant nuclear reactor in which radioactive events take place with such subtle calculations that scientists cannot yet fully explain. This is a miraculous phenomenon, for normally, it is not possible for four positively-charged hydrogen atoms – which normally move around randomly – to come together and form helium.

Fusion radioactive chain reactions in the Sun continue as follows:

a) ¹H + ¹H → ²H + β⁺ + V_e

b) ²H + ¹H → ³He + ϒ

c) ³He + ³He → ⁴He + ¹H + ¹H

First, while two hydrogen (¹H) particles join, “deuterium” (²H) – which has a proton and a neutron – as well as positron and energy are created. Thanks to another hydrogen reacting with deuterium, a helium isotope with a neutron and gamma rays are formed. The reaction of this helium with similar helium particles results in the formation of two-neutron helium and two hydrogen atoms.

The force that fuses the two separate atomic nuclei that hold deuterium together is called “strong nuclear force.” The nature of this force cannot be fully explained. Theoretically, it is said to be generated through the back-and-forth movement or effect of a particle called “pion” between the protons. This force is the greatest physical force in the universe and is 10³⁶ times stronger than the force of gravity. Thanks to its power, this force is capable of fusing two hydrogen nuclei that normally repel each other with great force.

If this force was weaker than its current level, it would not be able to hold two hydrogen nuclei together. Any two adjacent protons would repel each other immediately, and the nuclear reaction in the Sun would end before it started. That is, the Sun would never exist.

What if the strong nuclear force was a little bit stronger?

George Greenstein explains that if this great force was a bit stronger, then the Sun would change completely, for the first stage of the reaction in the Sun would then be the production of di-protons, not deuteron. The weak nuclear force would be reduced to null and only the strong nuclear force would remain in the loop. In that case, the Sun’s fuel would immediately become so disproportionately effective and massive that the Sun and all similar stars would be blown to smithereens in a matter of seconds [3].

Yet, this is not so. The Sun has been set into motion as the main source of life on Earth, located millions of kilometers away.

“The Sun and the Moon are by an exact calculation (of the All-Merciful).” (The Qur’an, 55:5)

Notes

1. Movement caused by the temperature difference in fluids.
2. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/esa-nasa-s-soho-reveals-rapidly-rotating-solar-core
3. Greenstein, George. 1988. The Symbiotic Universe. William Morrow.

Paul Davies, a British-born cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and bestselling author, conducts inter-disciplinary research in the areas of physics, cosmology, and biology. Dr. Davies is the director of a new research center at Arizona State University called Beyond. The mission of the center is to explore the great questions of our existence, the origin of our universe and life, the nature of consciousness, and the mathematical laws that underpin the universe. He is particularly interested in the Big Bang Theory, one of the most influential theories of our time concerning the origins of our universe.

Matter&Beyond: You are a cosmologist and the topic obviously is fascinating. But what is the root of our connection with space? What is the root of our human fascination with the sky and stars?

It’s very interesting to speculate if human beings had developed on a planet that was totally covered in cloud and had no awareness of the sky and astronomical bodies, whether society would’ve developed very differently. It’s quite clear when you look back at human history that the “heavens,” as they used to be called, had a very major role to play in all early civilizations. We can see evidence of astronomical observatories, thousands of years ago, long before the invention of telescopes. There are monuments, for example, pyramids that were built or Stonehenge in England, which are clearly astronomical monuments of some sort. And then we think of the world’s great religions and they all have an astronomical component. Think of the role of the new moon in Islam, for example, or the Star of Bethlehem in Christianity. … I think we can trace this preoccupation with the sky and the heavens to the early days of the development of agriculture because it became really important for people to know when to plant their crops and when to harvest them and the different seasons and so on. We can imagine that, say 10,000 years ago, people studied the sky very, very carefully and they became familiar with the movement of the objects and they invented complicated mathematical formulas to chart them.

M&B: How did our fascination with space change after industrialization?

What I would say has happened in the last three or four hundred years is that actually most people have become less aware of space. We live in cities that are polluted so we don’t see outer space. We’re too busy looking at televisions or driving home from work so we never look up and see this wonderland above our heads. How many people, for example, could name even the major constellations of stars if they were ever taken outside of their cities to somewhere where they could see the dark night sky? And so astronomy has become in a way less and less significant in people’s lives.

M&B: But today astronomy and cosmology is making a comeback. There are a lot of bestseller popular science books written on space and time.

I think during the 1970s and ‘80s people became very antiscientific, perhaps as a result of a reaction to the Vietnam War. Astronomy somehow remained aloof from that. It was perceived as a subject that wasn’t dangerous, that we could study the stars, they were a long way away using benign equipment like telescopes and astronomers weren’t going to threaten anybody. And so I think exploring the universe has been seen in many ways as a sort of untainted glorious enterprise that doesn’t have this sort of threatening aspect to it. It’s still, of course, immensely popular. People still want to go to planetariums and they read books on astronomy and they like television productions on astronomical things. But I think it’s shifted now from those early days where people’s lives really revolved around the stars in a very literal sense, and those days are now gone.

M&B: You are a cosmologist, but based on the wide range of research areas at the center Beyond, I would say that you look more like a modern seeker of old times.

Since the dawn of human history people have asked the great questions of existence, how did the universe come to exist? What is the role of human beings in the great cosmic scheme of things? How will the universe end? What is it made of? Now for the greater part of human history, these questions were addressed by priests and philosophers. But in recent years, science has made progress as well. So scientists find themselves now asking those same age-old questions of existence. In my career, I have covered topics like the origin of the universe and the origin of life, the nature of time, the nature of consciousness, and the underlying laws of the universe. Inevitably these topics trespass on territory which was previously almost exclusively philosophy or religion’s. Now science has a story to tell about these great issues.

M&B: If you have to pick the most interesting question modern science is trying to answer, what would be your choice?

I suppose the most interesting thing modern science is telling us about is how the universe came into existence. When I was a student, the Big Bang Theory was just one of many ideas about the origin of the universe. But over the past 30 years it’s become much more secure so that not only do we know that there was a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, but we know a great deal about the details including the conditions that prevailed in the universe back to as little as one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. So we’re now able to reconstruct precisely how the universe went bang and how it developed over the subsequent billions of years into what we see today. So I think that the scientific story of the genesis of a universe is fascinating—its origin, its explosive outbursts, and the long period of enrichment and complexification of matter leading eventually to the emergence of life and beings like ourselves who could look back and reflect on it all.

M&B: The Big Bang Theory is well established. Yet it’s still open to commentaries and interpretations.

It’s often said that science deals with “how?” questions and religion deals with “why?” questions and so you don’t normally go to a scientist to find meaning or purpose in the universe. Nevertheless it is clear that because science is now able to fill in so many details about the big picture, that scientists are inevitably asked to make pronouncements about meaning and purpose. As they do so, they divide about equally into two groups. One group who says, “Well, the universe is beautiful, it’s so ingenious that it looks as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator but in fact it hasn’t.” There is no meaning, no purpose in the universe. The famous quote by Steven Weinberg, the American cosmologist, goes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Then the other half of cosmologists look at this same set of facts and they agree about the facts but they interpret them differently. They will say, “Well, it does suggest that there is a grand scheme of things, it does suggest that the universe is about something. This grand and wonderful scheme, which is so ingeniously constructed, does suggest that there is something deeper to it all.”

M&B: We find more and more scientists thinking and writing about these topics on both sides.

Human beings usually are not happy just to have a technical description of how the universe works, and in particular people always want to ask the question what happened before the Big Bang? What made the Big Bang go bang? Why is there a universe in the first place, and why is the universe as it is and not something different? And these are questions right on the edge of science because science really can only deal with things that can be measured and observed. They can deal with the facts of the world, the things before us. When we come to questions about why does the world exist at all or why are there laws and where do those laws come from, it’s very difficult for science to make a contribution. Nevertheless, in the last ten or twenty years more and more scientists have been addressing those questions. The nature of physical laws is a very good example… When I was a student, you were simply told the laws of physics are what they are, we don’t know why, maybe there isn’t any reason why—that’s just the way it is. It was not the job of the scientists to ask why those laws of physics exist. The job of the scientist was to discover what the laws are and then apply them. But that has changed. There is now a feeling that maybe the nature of physical laws is something that is a proper, legitimate subject for scientific inquiry. And so there’s a whole bunch of physicists who are looking at alternative laws.

M&B: How do they theorize alternative laws?

Supposing we stipulate a different law of gravitation and see what the consequences would be. We can work out using mathematics what it would be like if gravity differed a little bit from the observed law. And then we can do the same with the other forces of nature and other features of the world. What would it be like if we lived in the universe with 23 space dimensions instead of three? We can work that out. Partly that’s a recreational exercise—it would be fun to know what it would be like in a universe with different dimensions or different forces—but also we would like to know is there anything special about the particular laws of this particular universe.

M&B: What is the result of such experiments?

There is something special and that special thing is that the particular laws that we observe in this universe are very strangely conducive to the emergence of life. They’re highly suited to life, even suspiciously so. It’s almost as if these laws have been fine-tuned for life, and so at that point disagreement sets in and some scientists say, “Well, it’s just a lucky coincidence that that is the case,” and others say, “No, there must be some other explanation for it.” But it is certainly the case that the universe we observe and the laws that underpin it, which used to just be regarded as given, as not a proper subject for inquiry, are now being studied as one set among a vast variety of possible sets, and it’s generally agreed that the particular laws that we observe are very special in their relation to the ability to bring forth life.

M&B: And you call this a “cosmic jackpot.”

My book, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, examines a very specific problem, the problem of why the universe seems to be just right for life. When we look at the fundamental laws of physics and the way that the universe originated in the Big Bang, there are many features that appear to be coincidences or the happy arrangement of different aspects of physical laws without which there would be no life and no observers like ourselves. And the question is, What are we to make of that? Some people say, “Well, it looks like the whole thing is a fix, it looks like the universe is being created by an Intelligent Designer.” Well, obviously all the scientists aren’t going to believe that. So instead they come up with other explanations.

M&B: There is the theory of multiverses.

According to that theory, there are many universes each of which has its own set of laws and these laws are just randomly distributed across these universes. So here and there, just by chance, the laws are going to come out just right for life. It’s no surprise that we find ourselves living in a universe where conditions are just right for life because we could hardly live in a universe which had laws of physics that did not permit life. It’s like a gigantic cosmic lottery with all of these different universes and we’ve just hit the cosmic jackpot because we’re winners of this vast lottery. So that is the popular view as to how we explain that the universe is just right for life. I think that view is progressive but I think it falls far short of providing a complete explanation of existence. I take life seriously and I take the mind seriously so I don’t think that these are just incidental phenomena in the great cosmic scheme of things. I think they’re fundamental to the workings of the universe as a whole and so what I’m trying to do here is to go beyond the rather startled debate between science and religion that’s existed for the last 30 years about the ultimate source of reality.

M&B: It just seems to me, just based on intuition, that we’re not alone here. The universe is so vast, there’s just got to be life somewhere. Does mathematics and statistics support this intuition?

A lot of people make that mistake by saying, statistically, there has to be life elsewhere, the universe is so vast, so many stars out there. It would be incredible if this was the only planet with life. It’s just simply not true. The probability of forming even the simplest enzyme, the simplest protein in known life, if you did it just by shuffling the building blocks, the amino acids that make up for that, is infinitesimal. If you took the entire volume of the universe and filled it with an amino acid soup and just kept shuffling and shuffling and shuffling, you would simply not make it. If it’s happened once, we’re it. It would not happen anywhere else. So the probability of life forming in that way by chance is twice as infinitesimal. So if that’s the way life happened, the fact we live in a vast universe makes no different whatsoever.

M&B: People who are not scientists may think that scientists are the smartest of all of us so they must be figuring out everything, they’re the smartest ones who bring the technology. They look at scientists as natural guides. Do you see a danger here?

Scientists are human beings like everybody else, and I think it’s a mistake to see scientists as generally cold, hard, soulless people who don’t care about the consequences of their work. Scientists are very passionate people and they feel passionately not only about their work but about other aspects of human life. It is also a mistake to think that scientists have any special moral authority over questions of general relevance to human beings. The vast majority of problems that we confront in the world really are only related obliquely, if at all, to science. We struggle with things like the ruin of our environment or international disputes or family concerns or education concerns. These sort of day-to-day things loom very large in people’s lives, but I’m not sure that scientists make a contribution. Science is obviously relevant to some of these things, for example, if we could find a better source of energy that doesn’t heat the planet, that would be good. So science can play a role, but individual scientists, I don’t think are any better than anybody else as moral judges.

There are seven chapters in the book. The first chapter summarizes the basic tenets of the classical narrative, then criticizes it listing many questions which the classical narrative cannot satisfactorily answer. Islamic civilization’s contribution to the development of modern science is so immense that it is impossible to completely ignore this part of the history in any serious discussion of the general history of science or civilization. The problem arises in assessing the importance and the nature of Islamic science. Generally accepted views of the classical narrative go something along these lines: Islamic civilization was a desert civilization and began to develop scientific thought only when it came in contact with more advanced civilizations (Persian, Indian and Greek and most importantly Greek). A vital component of the rise of science in Islamic civilization was the remarkable translation movement that took place during the early period of Abbasid times (750–900 CE), in which many important scientific books of other civilizations, particularly those of ancient Greeks, were translated into Arabic. The classical narrative says by learning Greek science through this translation activity, Islamic science reached its golden age while Greek science was neglected under Byzantine rule. Adherents of the classical narrative generally assume that Islamic civilization did not go much beyond translation, did not make original contributions to scientific knowledge or produced any new science of its own. They also assume this period of the golden age did not last long and came to an end with Ghazali’s “attack” on philosophers in his major work Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of Philosophers). They assume that Islamic science began to decline with Ghazali while there was an awaking in Europe, sometimes called the Renaissance of the twelfth century, when Europeans began to translate major Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Latin. Some of these texts had already been translated from much earlier Greek and Sanskrit texts into Arabic. So, they reconnected with their Greco-Roman legacy. The classical narrative says from that point on Europe had no need for Islamic science, hence the role of Islamic civilization was to simply translate and preserve the ancient Greek science and make it available to Europeans later. Thus, according to this view all the roots of modern science were European. The classical theory also attempts to explain the process by which the acquisition of Greek science by the Muslim world occurred. There are a few versions of this proposal which are called “contact theory,” “pocket transmission theory,” and “translation through Syriac medium first.”

In this first chapter of the book, Saliba argues that the classical narrative is an oversimplification of what actually happened in reality and fails to answer many fundamental questions. The first problem is about origins. He argues none of the proposed methods of translation is convincing to explain the reasons why, how, and when Muslims acquired Greek science. In terms of the nature and quality of translations, Saliba gives examples of sophistication and maturity exhibited by the Muslim scientists that is well beyond what would be expected from an early generation of translators who are struggling to understand a foreign science. Moreover, already in the early period of the translation movement Muslim scientists produced original new science such as algebra by al-Khwarizmi (830 CE), remarkable advances by Habash a-Hasib (850 CE) in the field of trigonometry and mathematical projections that go far beyond what was known from Indian and Greek sources, and developed decimal fractions. He argues such advances could not happen suddenly. There must be a longer tradition of scientific activity in the Islamic world and real motivations for the rise of science which cannot be explained by the classical narrative.

Not only does the classical narrative fail to explain beginnings but also more recent developments as well. Saliba gives many examples from various scientific disciplines to show that the Islamic science did not decline after Ghazali. Astronomy is a perfect counterexample to this thesis of the classical narrative, and it is not the only one. In fact, there were so many advances in astronomy in the Islamic world after Ghazali that Saliba calls the post-Ghazali period as the golden age of Islamic astronomy. Recent research in the second half of the twentieth century shows that astronomy has particularly interesting connections to the European Renaissance. Saliba comments that post-Ghazali works by the Muslim scientists were not sufficiently considered by the adherents of the classical narrative because of their pre-supposition that no significant science of any interest could have been produced in this period. This caused unfortunate damage in terms of understanding the post-Ghazali period in the Islamic world as well as the European Renaissance itself.

In the second chapter, Saliba proposes an alternative thesis/narrative to the classical narrative in terms of the beginnings of the rise of scientific activities in the Islamic world. His thesis is based on the writings of Al-Nadim (full name Abu al-Faraj Muhammad b. Abi Ya’qub Ishaq al-Nadim) who wrote about intellectual history of the early Islamic period. Saliba also supports his thesis with well known historical facts. In summary, the alternative narrative proposes that there was already a significant amount of interest and activity in the nascent Islamic civilization before the translation movement began. Rather than learning science from others (Greeks) just because they came into contact with them, the Islamic world actively sought those sciences because of a keen interest to advance their own scientific knowledge. Unlike the classical narrative, the alternative thesis argues that Muslim scientists already had a high level of knowledge and maturity when the translation activities began. This is evidenced by the high quality of translations of highly technical materials, and corrections of errors in the original sources. The main societal factors for the rise of science in the new civilization are listed as a) the need for people (bureaucrats) with a high level of scientific knowledge in administrations, and b) competition between those people to acquire higher levels of scientific knowledge to be able to advance in the ranks of governments.

In the next chapter, Saliba gives detailed examples, mostly from astronomy, to show how critically Muslim scientists received and reacted to the Greek science. They noticed observational errors and internal inconsistencies in Greek texts. They also pointed out more philosophical and foundational errors and contradictions. Muslim scientists showed a high level of sophistication, maturity and critical spirit. They had a comprehensive look at the Greek texts they translated and studied them in relation to one another. Saliba argues that it is not possible to explain these phenomena with the classical narrative. Moreover, Muslim scholars went beyond just criticizing these errors and made many novel contributions to exact sciences. In the process, they realized the proper place of mathematics in the natural sciences. Saliba also comments that Muslim scientists continued to make original contributions to astronomy and other mathematical sciences long after Ghazali, when the classical narrative would preach the death of Islamic science.

In chapter four, Saliba gives examples of critical innovations by Muslim astronomers. He remarks that the interest of the Islamic society in astronomy was very strong due to many religious requirements that need to be answered by astronomy, such as visibility of the moon, daily prayer times, and qibla (direction of worship) etc. Such problems were not considered by Greeks before. Muslim astronomers could not ignore absurdities in Ptolemaic astronomy where mathematical models in Almagest violated the fundamental cosmological assumptions in Planetary Hypotheses. Although Ptolemy’s mathematical models usually made good predictions computationally, it was not satisfactory for the scientists in the new civilization to allow those models to violate the physical properties of the celestial bodies. They took it upon themselves to propose alternative mathematical models that satisfied both requirements. They were highly successful in that quest. The solution of this problem required some new mathematical theorems. Two of the most important of such theorems were Urdi’s Lemma and Tusi couple invented by Urdi and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in the thirteenth century. Both of these were fecund and fundamental theorems that were used repeatedly by many astronomers who followed them for a long time. Renaissance astronomer Copernicus was among those who made use of these theorems. Also noted in this chapter is Shams al-Din al-Khafri’s understanding of the role of mathematics in describing the physical phenomena.

The title of chapter five is “Science between Philosophy and Religion: the Case of Astronomy,” wherein Saliba considers the relationship between the religion of Islam and scientific developments in astronomy. He explains that religious motivations led to the creation of new disciplines such as ilm al-hay’a (science of configuration) and advances in trigonometry. He states that astronomy and trigonometry are the best examples which demonstrate the intersecting interest between the practice of a religion and scientific thinking that need to be developed as a result of that practice. Many important scientists in medieval Islam were at the same time religious authorities. A few examples among such scholars are Ibn al-Nafis, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and Ibn al-Shatir. Saliba also notes that the European paradigm of conflict between science and religion does not exist in the Islamic world.

“Islamic Science and Renaissance Europe: The Copernican Connections” is the title of chapter six. Researchers in the second half of twentieth century first realized that many of the astronomical models of Copernicus were identical to that of Ibn al-Shatir from three centuries earlier. This surprising discovery, which contradicted the view that Renaissance science was a European self-contained creation, opened the door for further investigations which revealed more surprising outcomes. The mathematical theorem called the Tusi couple that is mentioned above plays an important role in Copernicus’s model. Copernicus stated the theorem and proved it in 1543 without mentioning that he invented a new theorem or saw it in any other source. The theorem was first invented and proved by Tusi in the middle of the thirteenth century. By comparing the two proofs, W. Hartner noticed in 1973 that Copernicus’s proof was identical to Tusi’s. He even used the same letters for essential geometric points. That is where Tusi used the Arabic letters “alif,” “ba” etc. Copernicus used the corresponding Latin letters “A,” “B” etc. This discovery makes it pretty certain that Copernicus knew about Tusi’s work.

Saliba shows Copernicus’s case is not an isolated instance and gives more evidence in this chapter of the phenomenon that “there are much too many coincidences of ideas appearing first in Arabic texts usually written between the 12th and 15th centuries, which reappear, without much explanation, in Latin sources of the 16th and 17th centuries.” Saliba’s explanation of this phenomenon is that by the Renaissance time men of science themselves learned Arabic and no longer needed translations. There are many examples that show European reliance on Arabic sciences in the post-Copernicus period when the whole worldview was supposed to have been changed by him. Renaissance men of science had a high regard for the Islamic sciences and were looking to the Islamic world for the latest in scientific activities rather than the classical Greek sources.

In the last chapter Saliba discusses the age of decline in Islamic science. He starts by rejecting the two main reasons proposed by the advocates of the classical narrative and argues that it did not start after Ghazali (eleventh century) or the destruction of Baghdad by Mongols in 1258. Saliba says that those who believe the first reason look at the Islamic civilization as a source of religious thought only and operate under the assumption that the European paradigm of conflict between religion and science applies to Islamic world as well. Saliba argues that this assumption is not true for the Islamic world and that scientific activities did not decline after Ghazali. Those who think the main reason was the destruction of Baghdad by Mongols saw the Islamic civilization mostly in political terms and paid little attention to its intellectual history. Saliba gives many examples of high quality and sophisticated scientific production in the Islamic world, mostly in astronomy but in other areas as well, well after both of these events. He says those examples were ignored or not properly read by the adherents of the classical view who did not expect to find any important scientific production in the Islamic world after the thirteenth century.

There still remains the problem and timing of decline of science in the Islamic world. When did it happen? Saliba notes that decline is a relative concept. What actually happened was the European science advanced more rapidly than the rest of the world after the sixteenth century. Hence it looked like science declined elsewhere, including the Islamic world. According to Saliba the main reason for these rapid developments in science in Europe was related to the discovery of the “new world.” He argues that the wealth and resources obtained by Europeans as a result of discovery of new lands helped them fund scientific activities. Europe witnessed the rise of royal and scientific academies where most educated men of the time were assembled and engaged in scientific research without having to worry about financial needs. Healthy competition among these institutions led to new scientific discoveries. Western superiority in science continues to this day and the constant brain drain that feeds the West at the expense of the developing and third worlds does not help to change the balance.

In summary, this book presents fundamental challenges to many of the commonly held views about the intellectual and scientific history of the Islamic world and proposes alternative explanations. The science of astronomy is used as a template to test and justify these claims. The author invites researchers to subject his proposals to the test of historical data in other disciplines as well. This book is highly recommended to all interested in the general history of science, and that of the Islamic world and the Renaissance period in particular.

Nuh Aydin is an associate professor of Mathematics at Kenyon College, Ohio, USA.

The debt that Briffault speaks of is often referred to as though it should be taken for granted: The Arabs only transmitted Greek science and made no contribution to the overall history of Western science. Fortunately, many historians of science no longer hold this view. The Arabs “ under an Islamic hegemony “ acquired the scientific heritage of earlier civilizations, including classical Greece and Rome, and translated, preserved, and transformed much of it. Their scientific experience profoundly impacted the late medieval world of western Europe, where Muslim scientific achievements were important to the evolving Renaissance and the grand narrative of the history of science.

Until recently, these historic achievements were unknown. Gradually, more evidence showing the magnificent work in Islamic science has come to light. Modern history of science studies show that the productive, original scientific research of Muslim scientists persisted into the sixteenth century. Yet, histories of Islamic science consistently claim that such science declined after the eleventh century due to the opposition of religious authorities (e.g., Imam al-Ghazali), Islamic law, and the absence of a capitalistic economy,(2) to name just a few.

But this theory, in addition to its palpable counter-intuitiveness, fails to explain the growing body of evidence for the rise of science in the Islamic world after the eleventh century. This article will discuss just a part of the accomplishment, importance and originality of Islamic science between the ninth and sixteenth centuries.

Islamic science defined

The more historians deconstruct the grand narrative of their discipline’s history, the harder it becomes to assign linguistic, civilizational, and cultural adjectives to science.(3) Using such adjectives as Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and more pertinently, western, in this context is quickly becoming obsolete, due to the newly-emerging understanding of the essentially hegemonic meanings such adjectives have always harboured.(4) These terms were often used as analytical categories that imparted some significance at the time when languages, cultures and civilizations used to embody individual characteristics that could distinguish them from one another.(5)

Now, however, such terms no longer serve the same functions, for the new scrutiny now being applied to such grand narratives of the history of science is making it quite obvious that these terms can no longer yield the same analytical results they used to yield.(6) In addition, such terms as culture, civilization, language, and science are no longer the same stable, commonly accepted terms of reference they once were,(7) since they embody ambiguities of their own and embody hegemonic theoretical structures that prohibit their modification with the old adjectives as was once done.(8) Furthermore, the intimate interconnectedness between scientific traditions makes it almost meaningless to speak of a Greek, Arabic or European science as if each had a character of its own.(9)

In light of the above, Islamic science (10) perhaps should mean science conducted mainly in Arabic and within the context of Islamic civilization, for many individuals from different ethnic and religious backgrounds were actively engaged in this undertaking: Christians (e.g., Hunayn ibn Ishaq), Persians (e.g., Ibn Nawbakht), Sabians (e.g., Thabit ibn Qurrah), and Jews (e.g., Masha’allah). Arabic was the main scientific, but not necessarily the native, language of these scientists. While the terms Islamic science and Arabic science are modern historical terms for the science conducted within the context of Islamic civilization, this science is Islamic in the sense that it suited the new and growing needs of Islamic civilization; was available entirely in Arabic, which had replaced Syriac; and was familiar to an increasing number of Muslim translators, students, and scientists./(11) It is in this context that Islamic science will be used in this article.

Of equal importance is the realization that Islamic science, in this context, does not imply religious sciences (e.g., jurisprudence) but rather the natural sciences (e.g., mathematics, astronomy, and physics). Nor does it imply the type of science that states that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, can be found in the Qur’an.(12) This view examines the Qur’an’s scientific content and claims that, from relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory to the entire field of embryology and much of modern geology has been ˜discovered’ in the Qur’an.(13) Its adherents claim that scientific experiments have been devised to discover what is mentioned in the Qur’an but not known to science. Although this view is now the most popular version of Islamic science, it is not the one implied in this article.

Nor does it imply the mystical perspective that equates Islamic science with studying the nature of things in an ontological sense. In this viewpoint, the material universe is studied as an integral and subordinate part of the higher levels of existence, consciousness and modes of knowing.(14) Given such a context, science is not a problem solving enterprise and socially objective inquiry but more a mystical quest for understanding the Absolute.(15) This view also advocates the idea that in this universe, conjecture and hypothesis have no real place; all inquiry must be subordinate to the mystical experience.(16) Thus, its advocates view all science in Islamic civilization as sacred science, a product of a particular mystical tradition that traces its roots to the Greek neo-Platonists. This view, however, has been strongly refuted by Muslim historians of science (e.g., Ahmad al-Hassan) and Western historians (e.g., David King and Donald Hill).

Having said that, in this article Islamic science means any natural science that depends upon observation and experimentation, as well as rational thought in a critical way, that was studied by scientists of various religious and ethnic backgrounds who operated under an Islamic hegemony.

Islamic science remains largely unappreciated

With the exception of a few scholars, the contributions of Muslims scientists have been “ and remain “ poorly understood in the West. Western literature on Muslims presents them as mere torch-bearers of Greek science. This view is a product of Orientalism, which treats the Orient and Orientals as an ˜object’ of study inscribed by Otherness.(17) This typology is based on a real specificity but detached from history, and thus conceived as intangible and essential,(18) which, according to Ziauddin Sardar, the European man, from Greek antiquity onwards, becomes the measure of all men everywhere.(19) Accordingly, Muslim contributions to science were deliberately ignored or suppressed, and the view that Muslim scientists produced nothing original remained the orthodox belief until the mid-twentieth century.

In astronomy, for example, Kevin Krisciunas states that it is a common misconception that astronomical research fell into a dazed slumber following Ptolemy [the Greek scientist who lived during the second century], not to reawaken until the time of Copernicus.(20) Accordingly, Western historians of astronomy, like Neugebauer and Delamere, find nothing to report about Islamic astronomy.(21) The distinguished physicist-philosopher-historian Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), on the other hand, believed that: The revelations of Greek thought on the nature of the exterior world ended with the Almagest, (by Ptolemy) which appeared about A.D. 145, and then began the decline of ancient learning. Those of its works that escaped the fires kindled by Mohammedan warriors were subjected to the barren interpretations of Mussulman [Muslim] commentors and, like parched seed, awaited the time when Latin Christianity would furnish a favourable soil in which they could once more flourish and bring forth fruit.(22)

In other words, Muslims were fanatic, rampaging hordes, burners of Greek science, and also pale imitators, copiers of the Greeks.(23) Duhem also believed that: There is no Arabian science. The wise men of Mohammedanism were always the more or less faithful disciples of the Greeks, but were themselves destitute of all originality.(24) Ernest Renan (1823-92), the influential French philologist, believed that Islamic science could only flourish in association with heresy, and that science in Islam was merely parasitic on Greek culture and that Islam was simply a vehicle transmitting Greek philosophy to the Renaissance in Europe.(25) Other historians repeated the view that Muslim scientists acted as unproductive transmitters of Greek science. Von Grunebaum suggested that Islamic science was a mimic of Greek science, and asserted that Islam failed to put natural resources to such use as would insure progressive control of the physical conditions of life. Inventions, discoveries, and improvements might be accepted but hardly ever were searched for.”(26)

Prominent historians of Islamic science, however, explain that modern research in Islamic science poses a challenge to what is at best a caricature of history, one that portrays the ˜torch’ of science and knowledge as something that was handed down from the ancient Greeks to medieval Europe by way of Islamic scholars.(27) The danger of this representation is that it miscasts the role of the Islamic civilisation in the scientific revolution and undermines the often deep relation between cultures and intellectual movements.(28) Furthermore, it allows historians of classical science to conclude, science as theory is Greek and as experimental method it was born in the seventeenth century,29 thereby neglecting the contributions of Muslim scholars in between.

According to the torch theory, therefore, Islamic science constituted an excavation site, in which the historian is the archaeologist on the track of Hellenism.30 This approach, explains Rashed, has frequently ended up misrepresenting the results of Greek science as well as those of the seventeenth century, a necessary distortion if one wishes to link the two ends of the chain in a continuous history; on the other hand, and not without coincidence, it has led to some famous blunders affecting not only interpretation but comprehension too.(31)

Recent scholarship, however, confirms that Muslim scientists were more than just torch-bearers of Greek science, and that, in fact, they influenced the Renaissance. For example, in his The Middle East, Bernard Lewis explains that Greek science, on the whole rather tended to be theoretical. Medieval Middle Eastern [Islamic] science was much more practical, and in such fields as medicine, chemistry, astronomy and agronomy, the classical heritage was clarified and supplemented by the experiments and observations of the medieval Middle East.(32)

Today there is sufficient information about the quality and staggering quantity of Islamic science. Muslim scientists were active in many fields, from astronomy to zoology, and made original contributions. For example, recent research in astronomy shows that the mathematical models of Ibn Shatir, a fourteenth-century scientist, and the work of astronomers at the famous observatory in Maragha, laid the foundation for the Copernican revolution.(33)

Thus the novelty of Islamic science was that it was not the fruits of chance meetings, but the deliberate results of a massive movement of scientific and philosophical translation, undertaken by professionals “ sometimes rivals “ supported by power and stimulated by the research itself.(34) This movement resulted in the creation of a library on the scale of the world of its time.(35) Hence, for the first time scientific traditions from different backgrounds and languages became elements of one science, whose language was Arabic, and found ways of reacting together to engender new methods and sometimes even new disciplines, such as trigonometry, algorithms, and algebra.

Nevertheless, most people remain unaware of the importance of Islamic science. For example, most Westerners know that the Muslims invented algebra, Arabic numerals, and possibly the zero, but not that Islamic science is a possible concept.(36) Thus the most widely used American university textbook for the history of science (37) shows no interest in Islamic science per se and ignores most of the research on Islamic science conducted during the past 50 years.(38) Europe has no such textbook at all, and the less said about modern Arabic books on Islamic science the better.

Only recently has the Western scholarly community produced a substantial amount of reliable literature on the subject, some even for the general reader. For example, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1970-80) contains a series of articles on the major Muslim scientists, as does the Encyclopaedia of the History of Arabic Science (1996).

The contributions of Muslim scientists are even less well understood in the Islamic world itself, let alone elsewhere in the world. No serious modern work of a general nature on Islamic science is available in Arabic, except George Saliba’s The Origin and Development of Arabic Scientific Thought (1998). Also, very little of the research of the past 50 years is available or even known in the Muslim world.

According to King, the surviving written works and artefacts relating to the achievements of Muslim scientists are some 10,000 manuscripts preserved in libraries around the world, and some 1,000 instruments preserved in museums and private collections. (39) This is an insignificant number when compared to some of the libraries that existed during Islamic civilization’s golden age, when there were about 500,000 such manuscripts on their shelves. Few of the surviving major scientific works have been translated, and modern scholars have never read thousands of these manuscripts. Simply put, the history of Islamic science as a field remains virgin territory. Nevertheless, as little as we know about Islamic science, scholars affirm that every single specialised science in the West owes its origins to the Islamic impulse “ or at least its direction from that time on.(40)

Original contributions and their impact on modern science

Islamic science made many important contributions to the history of European scientific thought. Its importance can be deduced from its original contributions and impact. Islamic science influenced the sciences of the West, and thus had a direct influence on the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.

In the twelfth century, the West discovered, via a translated catalogue of sciences (map of knowledge) by al-Farabi, the existence of a considerable body of Antiquity’s scientific work. The West started examining these sciences, including astronomy, biology, botany, mathematics, and medicine. In addition, the medieval European university became the institutional manifestation of al-Farabi’s map of knowledge. In fact, the translated work of Islamic knowledge formed the basis and the scientific foundation of the university in its living reality “ the reality of its syllabus, the content of its teaching.(41)

The originality of Islamic science and its significant innovation is clear in several fields, including mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Due to this topic’s vastness, this article shall confine itself to these three fields.

Originality in mathematics

Recent research proves that many of the ideas that once were thought to belong to European mathematicians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were in fact originated by Islamic mathematicians. In many respects, the mathematics studied today is far closer in style to that of the Muslims than of the Greeks.(42)

In the case of mathematics, Muslims initially were transmitters of almost all the important mathematical ideas of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, Persia, and the Hellenistic world. But they also made original contributions that directly influenced arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and algorithms. Before learning of Indian numerals and the dust-board system early in the eighth century from Indian and Persian sources, the Muslims used finger computation, also called the arithmetic of the scribes or secretaries because it was used by government bureaucrats. This Indian system could express any number by using only 10 figures, including an empty place for zero, and the results were written out in words. (43) Though this system was far easier than, and superior to, the Babylonian sexagesimal system (in which letters replaced numbers), the latter system was still being used especially by astronomers. While the Babylonian system was developed for practical business needs, the Indian system was inspired by the Hindus’ inherent philosophical bent.

The Muslims recognized the importance of the Indian system and thus transformed it into the well-known Arabic numerals. This system, still used today in the West, enabled the West to achieve great breakthrough in mathematics. Arabic numerals became an intensely workable code, one so simple that literally any child can handle it, so flexible that in the hands of the mathematicians it became a vocabulary by which the most complex relations between the most astronomical quantities can be expressed. It was a revolution on a par with the invention of the computer; one was able to reduce the cosmos to a system of ten elementary symbols, from zero to nine. (44)

Arabic numerals were first transmitted and used in the West during the latter half of the twelfth century through the translation of the first part of al-Khawarizmi’s The Book of Addition and Subtraction in Indian Arithmetic, which survives as a translation only. By this time, many other important works in Arabic were well ahead of the West, including the work of al-Karaji (c.1000), ˜Umar al-Khayyam (d. 1130), as-Samaw’al (d. c. 1175), and Ibn al-Haytham (d. c. 1040).

Muslims also developed Greek geometry and then used it in surveying, in designing wheels of all kinds, including waterwheels and other systems for drawing water, in improving farming equipment, and, inevitably, in devising engines and devices of war, such as catapults and crossbows.(45) In the ninth century, Thabit ibn Qurra wrote on cubatures and quadratures, and used the method of exhaustions in a manner that anticipated the development of integral calculus; advanced the study of parabolas; and used integral sums to find the area of a parabola’s segment. He also translated Appollonius’ Conics, several of Archimedes’ treatises, and Nicomachus’ Introduction to Arithmetic, in addition to calculating the volume of the parabolic and giving a geometrical solution to some third degree figures.(46)

In geometry, Umar al-Khayyam and al-Tusi re-examined the fifth postulate of Euclid concerning the parallel line theorem, which concerns the very foundation of Euclidean geometry.47 Though they did not claim to challenge Euclid’s postulates, however, their work eventually led to G. Saccheri’s first attempt to formulate a non-Euclidean geometry (1733).

While the Greeks had calculated a table of chords, trigonometry was invented by the Arabs. (48) Muslim scientists were the first to formulate explicit trigonometric functions. The first scientist to use tangents (zill) was the astronomer Habash al-Hasib, who also knew of the sine, cosine, and cotangent functions. More influential was Abu al-Wafa al-Buzanji, the first person to demonstrate the sine theorem for a general spherical triangle and to invent the secant (qutr al-zill). The latter discovery is usually attributed to Copernicus. Al-Biruni wrote the first independent work on spherical trigonometry, calculated the approximate value of a diagonal of one degree, and was the first to demonstrate that for a plane triangle ( a/sinA = b/sinB = c/sinC ).(49)

Muslim mathematicians also invented algebra. Al-Khawarizmi (780-850), the greatest Muslim mathematician and the first to establish algebra, is known for being instrumental in converting Babylonian and Hindu numerals into a simple and workable system that almost everyone could use.(50) He is also best known for originating the mathematical terms and concepts of algebra and the algorithm (which is derived from his name al-Khawarizmi). He composed many astronomical tables, worked on arithmetic and algebra, and is recognized as the founder of algebra, for he initiated the subject in a systematic form and developed it to the extent of giving analytical solutions of linear and quadratic equations.

His book The Book of Summary concerning the Process of Calculating Compulsion and Equation was used until the sixteenth century as the principle textbook of European universities. And it is from its title that the term algebra (al-Jabr: restoration and amplification of something incomplete; muqabala: the balance of the two sides of an equation) was derived. The Toledan translation of his book, Algorismi de numero indorum, had a profound impact upon the West and gave English such words as algorithm and cipher (Arabic for zero) and Spanish the word guarismo.

One of the many other mathematicians, the Persian Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid al-Kashani, devised a theory of numbers and techniques of computation that remained unmatched until recently. He also rediscovered the decimal fraction, discovered initially by al-Uqlidisi and then forgotten for centuries, made a remarkably accurate calculation of , is considered the inventor of the first calculating machine,(51) and is the first person to solve the Newton binomial theorem.

Originality in astronomy

George Saliba, a prominent historian of Islamic science, has greatly advanced our understanding of the importance of Islamic astronomy. He explains that medieval Islamic astronomers were not mere translators but also may have played a key role in the Copernican revolution, which ultimately influenced the Renaissance. The contribution of Islamic science was fundamental to the birth and subsequent development of astronomy in the West, for before this contribution the West had no advanced astronomy. The knowledge developed by Muslim astronomers produced changes in the West as regards the development of trigonometry, instruments, and the local star catalogues, and also affected the growth and development of astronomical theory proper.(52)

Astronomy was a practical science for the Muslims, because they used the stars as guides during their travel. Thus, astronomy became one of their greatest achievements. Its practical importance was also emphasized by the need to determine the prayer direction (qibla) and time regardless of one’s location.

Islamic astronomers surpassed the Greek mathematical methods, and developed trigonometry, which eventually provided the essential tools necessary for the astronomy that developed during the Renaissance. Medieval Muslim astronomers felt themselves challenged to find a simpler trigonometric method than that postulated by such earlier astronomers as Ptolemy. The study of astronomy was influenced by ancient sources, and Muslims were acquainted with Indian and Persian sources before Greek ones. The Persian Sassanids’ astronomical treatises were translated into Arabic during the eighth century. Ptolemy’s work was introduced in the ninth century. Around that time, such scholars as Thabit ibn Qurra and Hunayn ibn Ishaq translated Ptolemy’s major work Megalé syntax mathematiké (Almagest in Arabic). By the end of the ninth century, the Arabs had thoroughly studied and were acquainted with the work of Antiquity.

Before the spread of Islam, there was only one observatory in Alexandria; Muslims built observatories all over the Islamic world. The first one, al-Shammasiyah, was built in Baghdad built by al-Ma’mun in 828. Al-Battani built one at Raqqa (Iraq), Abdul Rahman al-Sufi built one at Shiraz (Persia), and in 1023 the Persian prince Ala al-Daula built one for Ibn Sina at Hamadan. Scientists at the famous al-Maragha observatory in western Iran greatly influenced Copernican astronomy, for their work led to the development of a planetary system that was mathematically equivalent to that of Copernicus. Such closeness caused Noel Swerdlow to ask, not whether, but when, where, and in what form Copernicus learned of those scientists.(53)

Advances in planetary theories were primarily the result of criticizing Ptolemy’s work, which had dominated the field since the time of al-Battani. While refining and improving the work’s details, rising dissatisfaction with many of its aspects led such scholars as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, and Ibn al-Shatir to criticize the Polemic (geocentric) system in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This criticism was, to some extent, very important in the later attacks made against him during the Renaissance. The work of astronomers like Ibn al-Shatir allows modern scholars like Saliba to conclude that at some level the Renaissance “ which was at least partly inspired by the Copernican revolution “ was not a purely European creation.(54) According to him, the role of Arabic astronomy was not to preserve Greek astronomy, but to correct its flaws and finally to seek alternatives to it.(55)

Thousands of Arabic manuscripts in major libraries remain unknown to scholars. However, eminent scholars like George Saliba and David King have advanced our understanding of Islamic astronomy’s originality and influence. Unlike the traditional view that Muslim astronomers accepted the Greek work as unalloyed truth, they in fact rejected much of it and forged a new astronomy that, later on, enabled Copernicus to lay the foundation of modern astronomy. Consequently, the original contributions made by Muslims astronomers challenge the idea that Muslim scientists only transmitted ancient Greek science and knowledge to medieval Europe without adding anything.

Originality in medicine

Muslims also excelled in and made original contributions to medicine. Islamic medicine was built on tradition, mainly the theoretical and practical knowledge developed in Greece and Rome. For Muslim scholars, Galen and Hippocrates were the pre-eminent authorities, followed by the Hellenic scholars in Alexandria. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars translated the voluminous writings from Greek (e.g., Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen) into Arabic, thus providing virtually all of Islam’s early medical students with their basic reference texts. Then, basing themselves upon these texts, they produced new medical knowledge. In order to make ancient medical works more accessible, understandable, and teachable, Muslim scholars ordered and systematized the vast and sometimes inconsistent Greco-Roman medical knowledge by writing encyclopedias and summaries.

The influence of Islamic medicine in the West was critical, due to the mass of information it conveyed to the West, because it helped establish medicine as a science, and because translated Arabic medical manuscripts gave a decisive direction to the teaching of medicine in the West.(56) Islamic medical knowledge built upon the achievements of classical Greece and Rome as well as that learned from Syriac, Persian, and Indian sources. After the relatively quick assimilation of this knowledge, Islamic medical writings became more systematic and synthetic, with an evident urge to produce the most comprehensive and complete medical reference work yet written.(57) A primary concern of Islamic medical scholars was the organisation of the vast body of knowledge into a logical and accessible format.(58) They also expanded theoretical discourses on causes and symptoms, and frequently introduced examples and procedures of an applied character. It was in this historical background that Islamic medicine developed and advanced, and at its zenith produced such towering physicians like Ibn Sina and al-Razi.

Al-Razi (Rhazes: 865-925) is the keenest original thinker and greatest clinician not only of Islam but of the Middle Ages,(59) and was the Islamic world’s greatest original clinical and observational physician. Along with Ibn Sina, they are considered to be among the greatest physicians ever known. In selecting a new site for the great hospital in Baghdad, al-Razi hung up shreds of meat and then chose the spot where they showed the least sign of putrefaction.

Al-Razi applied chemistry and physics to medicine, and wrote a medical encyclopedia and a treatise on smallpox and measles that was the earliest of its kind and considered a masterpiece of Arabic medical literature. He was a pioneer in pediatrics, obstetrics, and ophthalmology. In fact, his The Diseases of Children has led some historians to regard him as the father of pediatrics. He is also considered the inventor of the seton in surgery, and the first to relate hay fever to a rose’s scent,(60) isolate and use alcohol (al-kuhul) as an antiseptic, use mercury as a purgative (known in the Middle Ages as Album Rhasis), explain how to remove a cataract, and discuss the papillary reaction or widening and narrowing of an eye’s pupil. Furthermore, he mastered the way of treating by psychological shock and of using psychosomatic medicine and psychology. In its English translation, al-Razi’s Spiritual Physic devotes 20 chapters to various ailments that upset the soul and the body.

Al-Razi wrote many books on medicine, the major ones being Al-Hawi fi al-Tibb, (The Comprehensive Book), an encyclopedic composition of Greek, Persian, and early Arabic medical knowledge in their entirety, whose modern version is incomplete at 23 volumes.(61) The Sicilian Jewish physician Faraj (Farragut) ibn Salim was the first to translate Al-Hawi into Latin in 1279. Under the title Continens, it was repeatedly printed from 1486 onwards; a fifth edition appeared in Venice in 1542. Prior to the nineteenth century, Al-Hawi can be considered one of the most extensive medical texts ever written by a doctor.

His 10-volume Kitab al-Mansuri (Liber medicinalis ad Almansori), was translated in 1480 by Milan, and also into French and German. Gerard of Cremona translated the ninth volume, under the title Nonus al-Manuri, which remained popular in Europe until the sixteenth century. Here, he developed the science of anatomy by discussing such features as veins, arteries, dispositions of the heart, and so on.

His famous book on smallpox and the measles, Kitab fi al-Jadari wa al-Hasbah (Liber de Pestilentia), was very influential in Europe. It was first translated into Latin in 1565, and then into many other European languages. In fact, 40 editions were printed between 1498 and 1866. In 1848, William A. Greenhill translated it into English. Through this treatise, he became the first to draw clear comparison between smallpox and chickenpox. This treatise demonstrates quite well his concern for therapy, and its thoroughness stands in sharp contrast to the silence regarding the topic in the Hellenistic and Byzantine literature preserved today.(62)

Another great figure, Ibn Sina (Avicenna: 1126-98), was the most renowned physician, philosopher, encyclopedist, mathematician, and astronomer of his time. According to George Sarton, Ibn Sina’s thought represents the climax of medieval philosophy.(63)

One of his major contributions to medicine was his famous Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine), an immense encyclopedia of medicine that contains some of the most illuminating thoughts on the distinction of mediastinitis from pleurisy; contagious nature of phthisis; distribution of diseases by water and soil; careful description of skin troubles; of sexual diseases, and perversions; of nervous ailments (including love sickness); many psychological and pathological facts clearly analysed.(64) In it, Ibn Sina deals with the general principles of medicine, simple and compound drugs containing 760 types of drugs, disorders of each internal and external organ of the body, and diseases effecting all of the body, especially pathology and pharmacopoeia.

The Canon influenced Europe’s medical schools for the next 600 years and was probably the most used of all medieval medical references.(65) Gerard of Cremona translated it in the twelfth century. During the last 30 years of the fifteenth century, 15 Latin editions and one Hebrew edition were published. During the sixteenth century, it was reissued more than 20 times. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, it was the West’s chief medical book and fulfilled that function longer than any other medical work.

Ibn Sina was the first to describe meningitis and differentiate it from meningismus of other acute diseases and to suggest treatment for lachrymal fistula, the first to describe the manner of spread of epidemics and the contagious nature of tuberculosis. He described many details of the eye, such as conjunctive sclera, the cornea, choroids, the iris, the retina, the layer lens, the aqueous humour, the optic nerve, and the optic chiasm.

Other important medical figures were Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar, d.1161) for his work on diet, Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1121-98) for his work on general principles, and the Syrian Ibn al-Nafis (d.1288) for his discovery of the minor circulation of the blood.

Conclusion

The contribution of Muslims to science dispels the common beliefs that they only preserved and transmitted Greek knowledge to the West. Recent studies by competent historians has led to a qualitative shift in our understanding of their contributions. Such historians adduce that Muslim scientists both influenced almost every branch of science and were instrumental in influencing the Renaissance.

Today, however, the Muslim world produces a disproportionately small amount of scientific output, and much of it is of relatively low quality. In numerical terms, 41 predominantly Muslim countries, having about 20% of the world’s population, generate less than 5% of its science. Given Muslims past contributions to science, this situation raises several questions: Is there a dichotomy between Islam and modern science? If not, how does one explain the huge gap in scientific output between the Muslim world and the West or East Asia? And what must change so that science can flourish in Muslim countries?

The past achievements of Muslim scientists clearly show that Islam is not the key problem facing scientific achievement in the Muslim world of today. The theory that implies a dichotomy between Islam and science is part of a larger conflict in post-Enlightenment historiography that opposes science and religion in general in post-medieval civilizations. Rather, the problem is a result of cumulative “ as opposed to one dominant “ factors.

Footnotes 

1. Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity, (London, 1938), p.200.
2. Among those who suggest this are T. E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); P. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (Pakistan: Zed Books, 1992); J. J. Saunders, Muslims and Mongols: Essays on Medieval Asia (University of Canterbury: Whitcoulls Ltd., 1977).
3. George Saliba, Whose Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe, Columbia University http://www.columbia.edu/~gas1/project/visions/case1/sci.1.html.
4. Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.
5. George Saliba, Greek Astronomy and the Medieval Arabic Tradition, in American Scientist 90 (July-August 2002): 367.
6. We define science as systemized knowledge derived from observation, study, and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principle of what is being studied. This definition specifically excludes such applied fields as technology and engineering.
7. G. M. Wickens The Middle East as a World Centre of Science and Medicine, in Introduction to Islamic Civilisation, ed. R. M. Savory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 113.
8. Ziauddin Sardar, Islamic Science, www.islamonline.net/english/Contemporary/ 2002/05/Article21.shtml (2/6/2002).
9. Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.
10. Abdel-Malek (1981) quoted in Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 59.
11. Ibid. 19 Ibid.
12. Kevin Krisciunas, Astronomical Centres of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 23.
13. Salah Zaimeche, A Review on Muslim Contribution to Astronomy, (Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, 2002). Online at: www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=233.
14. Ibid. 23 Ibid.
15. Quoted in David C. Lindberg, The Beginning of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 1992), 175.
16. Ernest Renan (ed.), Islamism and Science, in Poetry of the Celtic Race and Other Studies (London: W. Scott., 1896), 85. Quoted in Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism & Globalism (New York: Routledge, 1994), 31.
17. Von Grunebaum, as cited in Ibid., 71.
18. Saliba, Greek Astronomy, 360.
19. Ibid.
20. Roshdi Rashed, Preface, in Roshdi Rashed (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Arabic Sciences (London: Routledge, 1996), 1:x.
21. Ibid. 31 Ibid.
22. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (New York: Touchstone Books 1998), 266.
23. Ibid.
24. Ahmed Djebbar, Une Histoire de la science arabe, entretiens avec Jean Rosmorduc (A History of Arab Science — Conversations with Jean Rosmorduc), (Paris: Seuil, 2001), in David Tresilian, Greeker than the Greeks, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 10-16 Jan. 2002, no.568. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/568/bo5.htm, p. xi.
25. Ibid.
26. David A. King, Proposal for an exhibition on Islamic science and technology, www.unesco.org/science/pao/exhib/islam2.htm#1.
27. David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1992.
28. King, Proposal. 39 Ibid.
29. Goldstein, T., Dawn of Modern Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980), 99.
30. Alain de Libera in Sabbaghi, R., The Arab Forebears of the European Renaissance (interview with French historian and philosopher Alain de Libera), UNESCO Courier (Feb. 1997) 2(6).
31. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? Online at:www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Arabic_mathematics.html.
32. Turner, H. R., Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 45.
33. Goldstein, The Dawn of Modern Science, 121.
34. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, 47.
35. Nasr, S. H., Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study (Westerham: Westerham Press, 1976), 82 and Science and Civilisation in Islam (New York: Plume Books, 1968), 149.
36. Nasr, Islamic Science, 82.
37. Huff, T. E., The Rise of Early Modern Science. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50. According to Baron Carra de Vaux, the Arabs founded plane and spherical trigonometry (Astronomy and Mathematics, in The Legacy of Islam, 1st ed., 276). Likewise, E. S. Kennedy agrees that Arab scientists created trigonometry, the study of the plane and spherical triangle (˜The Arabic Heritage in the Exact Sciences,’ Al-Abhath 23 (1970): 337. Also see his The History of Trigonometry: An Overview, in Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences, ed. E. S. Kennedy et al. (Beirut : American University of Beirut, 1983).
38. Nasr, Islamic Science, 84.
39. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, p.47.
40. See E. S. Kennedy, A Fifteenth-century Planetary Computer: al-Kashi’s Tabaq al-Aanateq’, Isis 41 (1950): 180-83 and 43 (1952): 42-50.
41. Henri Hugonnard-Roche, The Influence of Arabic Astronomy in the Medieval West, in Roshdi Rashed (ed.), Encyclopaedia,1:284.
42. Swerdlow, N., and Neugebauer, O., (1984), Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De revolutioibus (New York: Springer Verlag, 1984). Cited in Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 54.
43. Saliba, Greek Astronomy, 360.
44. In In defence of Copernicus. (Letters to the Editors), American Scientist 90, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 2002): 492 (1).
45. Danielle Jacquart, The Influence of Arabic Medicine in the Medieval West, in Roshdi Rashed (ed.), Encyclopaedia, 3:963.
46. Savage-Smith, Emilie, Medicine, in Ibid., 3:913.
47. Ibid. 59 Ibid.
48. Savage-Smith, Emilie, Gleanings from an Arabist’s Workshop: Current Trends in the Study of Medieval Islamic Science and Medicine, Isis 79 (1988): 246-72.
49. Ibid.
50. Savage-Smith, Medicine, 914.
51. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (New York: Robert Krieger, 1975), 1:709.
52. Ibid.
53. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam,136.