Who was "Ibn ul Haitham" and what are his contributions in the field of science?
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Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen in the Western world, was a pioneering scientific thinker who made significant contributions to the field of optics and vision theory. He was born in Basra, Iraq around 965 AD and later moved to Egypt. He is considered one of the most influential scientists in the medieval Islamic world.
His most famous work is the "Kitab al-Manazir" (Book of Optics), written around 1015-1021, where he discussed the theory of vision and light. Through experimentation, he demonstrated that vision occurs when light reflects from an object and then passes to one's eyes, challenging the long-held Euclidean and Ptolemaic theories that sight is the result of emanations from the eyes. This was a revolutionary idea and an important breakthrough in the understanding of how eyes work.
Ibn al-Haytham conducted various experiments and is credited with the invention of the pinhole camera (also called the camera obscura), as well as for accurately describing the parts of the human eye. He explained the phenomena of refraction and correctly argued that the speed of light is finite, although he could not measure it. His emphasis on empirical evidence and reproducible experimentation laid the groundwork for the modern scientific method.