|
Musicmystery -> RE: The Erosion of Progress by Religions (6/1/2014 6:57:37 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: GotSteel
quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
Now, if you want to argue for a decline in Islamic sciences starting in the 17th century, that argument can be made, due to a focus on turning to traditional sciences and abandoning their former embrace of experimental science.
[Quote]original: http://physics.about.com/od/cosmologybooks/fr/SpaceChronicles.htm
Between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1200 the intellectual center of the Western world was Baghdad. Why? Its leaders were open to whoever wanted to think stuff up: Jews, Christians, Muslims, doubters. Everybody was granted a seat at the debating table, maximizing the exchange of ideas. [...] Historians will say that with the sack of Baghdad by Mongols in the thirteenth century, the entire nonsectarian intellectual foundation of that enterprise collapsed, along with the libraries that supported it. But if you also track the cultural and religious forces at play, you find that the influential writings of the eleventh-century Muslim scholar and theologian Al-Ghazali shaped how Islam viewed the natural world. By declaring the manipulation of numbers to be the work of the devil, and by promoting the concept of Allah’s will as the cause of all natural phenomena, Ghazali unwittingly quenched scientific endeavor in the Muslim world. And it has never recovered, even to this day.
Sorry, but there's a whole lot of history that disagrees with you.
Incidentally, your quote is from a collection of various essays, interviews, and speeches by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson focusing on the developing role of NASA in the years to come. Not exactly a go-to source on Islamic science.
As already noted, the change took time, and by the 17th century, the turn was to traditional science away from experimental science. Those same number-phobic dudes, by the way, advanced algebra from its Babylonian roots. The Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam is credited with identifying the foundations of algebraic geometry and found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. Another Persian mathematician, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Tūsī, found algebraic and numerical solutions to various cases of cubic equations. He also developed the concept of a function. The Indian mathematicians Mahavira and Bhaskara II, the Persian mathematician Al-Karaji,and the Chinese mathematician Zhu Shijie, solved various cases of cubic, quartic, quintic and higher-order polynomial equations using numerical methods.
|
|
|
|
