The Scientific Method Was Founded Around 1020

According to recent investigations, Iraqi scientist al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham is the father of optics and the scientific method, having experimented with both of them around the year 1,020, which is more than 700 years ahead of Newton's time. The reason why this is unknown to Western teachers and professors is the fact that they assume that in the time between the downfall of the Greek civilization and the European Renaissance movement there were no scientific innovations to speak of.

However, this couldn't be further from the truth, as precisely this period was the time when Arabic civilizations contributed the most to world knowledge, in fields such as mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics and chemistry. Between the 9th and the 13th centuries, Arabic thinking really took off and continued progress while Europe was occupied with the joyous times of the Dark Ages.

In academic circles that heard of him, Haytham is considered to be the first real scientist, a man who set the basis for the idea that a specific phenomenon has to be observed carefully and analyzed, after which theorems need to be elaborated, to include all the possible states of that phenomenon. This is what later (early 17th century) came to be known as the scientific method, popularized by such thinkers as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

Haytham also experimented with the field of optics and was the first to say that the Ancient emission theory – which claimed that light sprung out of our eyes and lit the objects around us – was wrong, and that light was actually reflected from the objects we perceived, thus setting the basis for all that is modern optics. He also studied the dispersion of light, shadows, rainbows, and eclipses. Furthermore, by analyzing how light passed through the atmosphere, he calculated that it was approximately 100 km high, a fairly accurate estimate for the tools and knowledge of the time.