Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī -- Medieval Islamic Scientist, quite a read...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abū_Rayhān_al-Bīrūnī

by DaniFong • 18 years ago

55 50 18 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

michael_dorfman• 18 years ago

A real renaissance man, avant la lettre.

fiaz• 18 years ago

You could say that he was a hacker ;)

This notion of course goes against the mainstream interpretation of the hacker persona (the geeky, socially recluse male that is more familiar with computers than he is with his own body). But if you peruse the articles here at Hacker News, it encompasses a very diverse range of subjects (anything from health, math, science, business, charisma, etc.) that are not doubt, interesting to hackers.

I would go a step further and say that what hackers today have in common with Bīrūnī is that the diverse subjects he was most interested in were somehow overlapping with one another.

jfarmer• 18 years ago

"You could say that he was a hacker ;)"

You could, but that would sound really narcissistic.

reazalun• 18 years ago

It makes me wonder how can he did very well as a scientist, a physicist, an anthropologist, a comparative sociologist, astronomer, a chemist, a critic of alchemy and astrology, an encyclopedist and historian, a geographer and traveller, a geodesist and geologist, a mathematician, a pharmacist and psychologist, an Islamic philosopher and a theologian.

Today, even to become a decent mathematician is not an easy job!

sharjeel2• 18 years ago

back in the golden age people had true thirst for knowledge ithout any greed for materialistic gains.

mseebach• 18 years ago

He's a brilliant mind, no doubt about that. But those who ventured into science, basically up until 150 years ago, were usually royalty or similar, with incomprehensible wealth, and obedient (and often violently oppressed) subjects.

If you never, in your entire life, have to worry a second if you can feed yourself and your family and keep a roof over your head, you're probably slightly more keen to see what a life of sitting down and wondering might lead to.

eru• 18 years ago

No. Pragmatic needs have always shaped science. It is just that only recently craftsmen started to write. So just the written accounts of the gentleman-scientist survived.

gcv• 18 years ago

In the past, many notable thinkers worked in several fields at once. Pascal worked in math, philosophy, and theology; Descartes in math, philosophy, and the scientific method; Newton in physics, math, and theology. Leonardo da Vinci, of course, in engineering, art, mathematics, and music. Aristotle in medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. Narrow specialization is a fairly recent, and rather sad phenomenon.

orib• 18 years ago

true. However today any given field can be covered to a far greater depth than one person can be familiar with as well. 500 or 600 years ago, science was just smaller.

Half a millenium ago, I could probably know everything about the cutting edge of physics, astronomy, math, chemistry and optics in my head at once. 500 years ago, calculus had yet to be invented, fire was still thought to be "somehow" composed of phlogistons, and scientists were jsut coming to grips with the idea that the earth circled the sun.

Even 200 years ago, the knowledge encompassed by science was tiny compared to what we know today.

silentbicycle4• 18 years ago

The history of science and medicine in the Islamic world is very interesting. I don't remember any particularly good secondary sources offhand, but reading about the House of Wisdom in Baghdad is probably a good starting point.

Islam greatly accelerated scientific development in the region. Muslims traveling to Mecca brought local discoveries with them, which were shared and quickly spread throughout as they returned. Also, the emphasis on reading the Quran in its original Arabic, rather than translations, ensured that the travelers had a language in common. Not to take away from several real geniuses, but it didn't hurt to have the region so well-networked. This rapid spread of knowledge gave the intellectual centers in the region a wealth of resources to draw from.

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

The region had Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī, and Avicenna as contemporaries, and then Omar Khayyam soon after. Persia in that era was like Florence in the fifteenth century. Something in the water? Genetic fluke?

Probably not...

silentbicycle4• 18 years ago

I was going to make the same comparison. Both had a culture that encouraged scientific inquiry (within certain constraints), some fantastic libraries, rich local patrons that were willing to support research, and social and geographic circumstances that meant new ideas could spread relatively quickly.

Both environments seem like great examples of a general formula for encouraging a renaissance: create an environment that is attractive to geniuses and take care of anything that could distract them from bouncing ideas off each other. That sounds like good example of the sort of thing you can learn by studying history.

danw• 18 years ago

This wikipedia page seems like a good link rich start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

yters• 18 years ago

Counter opinion from a secular Turkish physicist:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/08/13/taner_edis/ind...

He thinks Islam-science scholars are selective in their representation of medieval Islamic science, and overemphasis their similarities with us.

mtw• 18 years ago

I am trying to imagine what a conversation between him and Leonardo da Vinci would be like.

also wondering how he got the funds to dedicate his life to science. was he a heir? or he was sponsored by kings and sultans?

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

Sponsored by the Empire. See my other comment for the long version.

petercooper• 18 years ago

I suspect the upvotes on this post answer this genuinely-asked question, but.. is it considered okay to post links to random interesting Wikipedia articles on HN? There are a lot of good ones.

alex_c• 18 years ago

To be honest, I'd rather have links to random interesting Wikipedia articles - knowing that there's a high probability that they've been selected by people with similar interests to me, but that I might not have found them on my own - than links to random blog posts about tech stuff that probably won't even matter half a year from now.

silentbicycle4• 18 years ago

Good question. If the scoring system works as intended, they will either lead to enough interesting discussion to merit upvoting (as with this one) or fade away.

Personally, I'm happy to see more science history stuff on the main page, rather than just tech/programming and startup/business stuff. (I was a history student, though, and I'm particularly interested in the history of science and medicine.)

Go the extra mile, though! There are much, much better sources for everything than Wikipedia.

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

My personal interpretation of Hacker News is it's news that's news to hackers...

froo• 18 years ago

I'm quite fond of that drawing in the article on phases of the moon. Theres just something about it that appeals to me, I can't put my finger on it though.

It is a real shame even some "modern day scientists" don't share his particular views on scientific method.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppjYDj9JUc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Q8p3GqPqQ

rokhayakebe5• 18 years ago

No surprise. Arabs back in those days have been known to have an excellent memory. At a very young age, Arab kids were able to memorize hundreds if not nearly a thousand of mid sized poems. This is probably why he was able to accumulate a deep knowledge in so many fields. Muslims have inherited this from Arabs. I have several friends who have memorized the entire Koran to the point where you open a page, start to read and they take it from there.

Arabs also were very well traveled individuals due to their commerce. They went from place to place, spending time with different communities and keeping notes. This is why they had a vast knowledge.

Arabs loved knowledge. They were great scholars. One of the teachings of the prophet of Islam was that Muslims are recommended to travel all the way to China to acquire knowledge. Back then traveling to China was probably like asking someone to bike from San Diego to Canada going through the mountains and desert.

rsheridan62• 18 years ago

This guy was a Persian. They are a different ethnic group with a different language and history.

rokhayakebe5• 18 years ago

Persian and Arabs share a whole lot of similarities. I lived with a Persian family for nearly 6 months so I have experienced it. On the other hand I lived 12 years across the street from a Arab family and I went to school with a few Arabs as well. I know Arabs, Persian, Assyrian..

rokhayakebe5• 18 years ago

At one point in history Persia was ruled by the Samanids who practiced Islam. If you said Islam in those days, you said Arab.

Although he may be Persian, you can most definitely be sure that he was deeply influenced by the Arabic tradition and culture.

maxklein3• 18 years ago

Please don't lump muslims into one huge group that have "inherited" something from Arabs. It's very inaccurate.

rokhayakebe5• 18 years ago

Maxklein,

Saying Muslims did not inherit a big portion of their tradition and culture from Arabs is like saying Africans did not inherit tradition and culture from colonials.

Now, I am both African and Muslim since birth. If you look at my username it says Rokhaya which is 100% Arabic and Kebe which is a common last name in West Africa.

Out of the 9 main languages in my country you will find plenty Arabic words in each one of them, yet you will not find as much of one language in another.

Secondly we are thought to memorize everything in academia and that we are able to do mostly because before going to school we spent our early days memorizing the Koran. Not understanding, not even being able to read in some cases, but memorizing the parchments.

Can you please explain further your statement and give some examples, and I will be able to go even further.

yamil• 18 years ago

You can tell the difference between reddit and hacker news just by reading the comments when the subject is related to "Islam".

asdflkj• 18 years ago

HN would be a lot better if people didn't high-five each other so much over how great this community is and how much everyone else sucks.

jm4• 18 years ago

Agreed. Coincidentally, that's the sort of thing I used to see on Reddit shortly before it turned into some monstrous Digg/Youtube hybrid.

adrianwaj• 18 years ago

Danielle, things have changed in recent times. There have only been 9 ever Nobel laureates who are Muslim.

http://aa.trinimuslims.com/showthread.php?t=2757

this is from a pool of 1.4 Billion Muslims. On the other hand 151 Jews have been awarded Nobel prizes from a pool of 12 million. http://www.science.co.il/Nobel.asp

http://israelist.blogspot.com/2005/09/jewish-muslim-nobel-pr...

Do you think that Islam over time has affected intellectual output, or that Jews have an advantage because of the religion? What do you think?

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

You can't count technological advance by Nobel prizes: they only started being relevant a century ago, and even then they're a poor proxy, and often decided by politics.

With regards to religion and science, I don't think you can consider the major religions or cultures by themselves as having much of an effect. It's all over the map... It varies with time, adminstration, fashion, the existence of certain schools. In the fifteenth century Catholics were far ahead in science, in the 11th, Muslims, during the 8th and 9th, the Chinese, at the beginning of the century, especially during the 1920's, Germany, then it was completely squashed by the Nazi's, then Hungarian Jews had a great run, spurring an American scientific dynasty of many ethnicities, and now it's fairly diffuse.

There is one major character to Jewish populations that seems to help them in science. Wherever they go, they seem to keep their culture intact. Since they're quite reverent towards education, it's traditionally meant that when the going got tough, the Jews were still studying.

DabAsteroid3• 18 years ago

There is one major character to Jewish populations that seems to help them in science. ... they're quite reverent towards education

What about Ashkenazi-Jewish IQ?

http://www.vdare.com/rushton/080616_lynn.htm

seven studies of Jews in Britain yield a median IQ of 110. ... In Canada too, there is an IQ hierarchy: Jews (109), ... These results are remarkably consistent over time, place, and situation ...

in How to explain high Jewish achievement: The role of intelligence and values, an article published in Personality and Individual Differences, by Lynn and Satoshi Kanazawa (PDF), we showed that only IQ had predictive value when pitted against values theories.

maxklein3• 18 years ago

Because to become a nobel laureate, you have to go through a very special selection process that is strongly biased towards western cultures. Imagine some kid right now in the middle of chad is born who is as clever as Einstein. What do you think the odds are of that guy making it all the way to a nobel prize?

Compare that to a person born into a culture where intellectual ability is encouraged and paid for by the community and network, and where he is going to be actively sought out to go into research laboratories and so on.

Things have not changed. What has changed is that the balance of the world has moved over to one group of people, and those that are within the group wonder why nobody else seems to be showing up for the party.

I've travelled the world, from China through Africa, over Europe and the U.S, and the difference and the opportunities available are not just large, they are almost insurmountable.

The ability is there in all of us, but the opportunity is often not.

Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī -- Medieval Islamic Scientist, quite a read...

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