Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham-"The father of modern optics!”

 

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐚 𝟏𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐠𝐨!

Here we have Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham al-Ash'arī (Alhazen). He is considered a pivotal figure in history and known as "The father of modern optics!”

Born around a thousand years ago in present-day Iraq, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was a pioneering scientific thinker who made important contributions to the understanding of vision, optics, and light. His methodology of investigation, in particular using experiments to verify theory, shows certain similarities to what later became known as the modern scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham is credited with explaining the nature of light and vision, through using a dark chamber he called “Albeit Almuzlim”, which has the Latin translation as the “camera obscura”; the device that forms the basis of photography.

H. J. J. Winter, a British historian of science, summing up the importance of Ibn al-Haytham in the history of physics wrote:"After the death of Archimedes no really great physicist appeared until Ibn al-Haytham. If, therefore, we confine our interest only to the history of physics, there is a long period of over twelve hundred years during which the Golden Age of Greece gave way to the era of Muslim Scholasticism, and the experimental spirit of the noblest physicist of Antiquity lived again in the Arab Scholar from Basra."