Pathfinders

"This is a history book, but about the history of science. It was an eye opener to me because I thought I knew about Arabic science and I didn’t. The story that most scientists will tell you is, “First there were the Greeks who did these wonderful things, and then later on there was the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. In between the Arabs and Islam held the torch.” The picture you get is that they kept the knowledge alive between Aristotle and Newton as it were and passed the torch down by transmitting what the Greeks had done. Yes, they were doing much more original things than most people think. In that standard picture of them passing the knowledge down, you usually hear about the Moors in Andalusia in Spain in the 12th century. That was indeed an important transmission point because that is the way a lot of knowledge got into Europe from Africa. But, actually, the really original scientific things in the Islamic world happened in Baghdad in the ninth century. A very wide range of things. They did original things in astronomy, in algebra and in medicine. They did a lot of things that the Greeks certainly did not do and which were not re-discovered until much later in Europe. There was someone who proposed the circulation of the blood, pretty much the same way [William] Harvey did, and there was an Arabic astronomer who proposed the heliocentric theory. They did amazing work in optics. It was clear that a number of them followed methods that we would recognise in modern times in a way that the Greeks did not. The Greeks were much more about armchair science. So this is a whole area of history that most Westerners don’t know too much about. It is because of this idea that somehow you understand knowledge better when you know where it has come from. It seems odd, because you may think the truth about the universe is the truth about the universe, but somehow, personally, I find it easier to understand if I follow the historical flow. I do this with my own work as well, over a smaller time scale. Some of my younger colleagues will just read the latest papers on something, but sometimes I just find them puzzling and I have to go back and work out how the scientists got to that point. October 14, 2012. Updated: May 11, 2022 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."