neilpcraven
08-25-2010, 09:27 AM
Inspired by the threads about the history of Photography I though I'd share my enthusiasm for an old fella who some of you may know of. Permit me a little bit of a shaggy dog story but hopefully it will illustrate why this guy was a 'cool dude'
His name is the Abū Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham. (he gets called al-Haytham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen)) He's long dead.
Well, 1000 years ago, he was considered pretty good at mathematics. So good, he was hired to predict the seemingly random episodes of the flooding of the Nile in Egypt, and to devise a way of stemming the flood when it next occurred. He built some clever structures that still exist today, which measured the height of the river, and through mathematical modeling could predict next time it would flood.
Sadly, the boss wasn't happy with that and asked him to actually stop the next flood. After trying to build a dam at Aswan (now known to be quite a good place to build a dam) he realised it was impossible and pretended to go mad to get out of the deal (this sounds bad now, but relative to what happened at the time to sane people reneging on a deal, was the best way out)
So our pal Al-Haytham was under house arrest from 1011 until his imprisoner's death 10 years later. This was before the Normans conquered England. In fact they had only just become Normans after invading France, lions still roamed Europe, and Spain was still Muslim, hundreds of years away from dominating the world with Catholicism and destroying Science with the Inquisition and the Dark Ages.
Anyway, he had some great ideas about optics. He proved that light travels in straight lines. He also made the first Camera Obscura. On the way, he just happened to define the Scientific Method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)
I would heartily encourage everyone to have a little read of what this fella did for Maths, Physics and Optics. And (if you'll forgive me for a little bit of politicising) think about where in the world he came from: Basra, Iraq.
He's certainly my photographic hero.
(for the record I'm not promoting this as a cultural/religious thing: I'm an athiest born as a Scottish Presbyterian)
His name is the Abū Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham. (he gets called al-Haytham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen)) He's long dead.
Well, 1000 years ago, he was considered pretty good at mathematics. So good, he was hired to predict the seemingly random episodes of the flooding of the Nile in Egypt, and to devise a way of stemming the flood when it next occurred. He built some clever structures that still exist today, which measured the height of the river, and through mathematical modeling could predict next time it would flood.
Sadly, the boss wasn't happy with that and asked him to actually stop the next flood. After trying to build a dam at Aswan (now known to be quite a good place to build a dam) he realised it was impossible and pretended to go mad to get out of the deal (this sounds bad now, but relative to what happened at the time to sane people reneging on a deal, was the best way out)
So our pal Al-Haytham was under house arrest from 1011 until his imprisoner's death 10 years later. This was before the Normans conquered England. In fact they had only just become Normans after invading France, lions still roamed Europe, and Spain was still Muslim, hundreds of years away from dominating the world with Catholicism and destroying Science with the Inquisition and the Dark Ages.
Anyway, he had some great ideas about optics. He proved that light travels in straight lines. He also made the first Camera Obscura. On the way, he just happened to define the Scientific Method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)
I would heartily encourage everyone to have a little read of what this fella did for Maths, Physics and Optics. And (if you'll forgive me for a little bit of politicising) think about where in the world he came from: Basra, Iraq.
He's certainly my photographic hero.
(for the record I'm not promoting this as a cultural/religious thing: I'm an athiest born as a Scottish Presbyterian)