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Science is the study of the physical world, but it is not just a topic, a subject, a field of
interest. It is a discipline—a system of inquiry that adheres to a specific methodology—
the scientific method. In its basic form, the scientific method consists of seven steps: 1)
observation; 2) statement of a problem or question; 3) formulation of a hypothesis, or a
possible answer to the problem or question; 4) testing of the hypothesis with an
experiment; 5) analysis of the experiment’s results; 6) interpretation of the data and
formulation of a conclusion; and 7) publication of the findings. One can study
phenomena without adhering to the scientific method, of course. The result, however, is
not science. It is pseudoscience or junk science.
Throughout history, many people in many parts of the world have studied nature without
using the scientific method. Some of the earliest people to do so were the ancient Greeks.
Scholars such as Aristotle made many observations about natural phenomena, but they
did not test their ideas with experiments. Instead they relied on logic to support their
findings. As a result, they often arrived at erroneous conclusions. Centuries later the
errors of the Greeks were exposed by scholars using the scientific method.
Perhaps the most famous debunking of Greek beliefs occurred in 1589 when Galileo
Galilei challenged Aristotle’s notions about falling bodies. Aristotle had asserted that
heavy bodies fall at a faster rate than light bodies do. His contention was logical but
unproven. Galileo decided to test Aristotle’s hypothesis, legend says, by dropping cannon
balls of different weights from a balcony of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He released the
balls simultaneously and found that neither ball raced ahead of the other. Rather, they
sped earthward together and hit the ground at the same time. Galileo also conducted
experiments in which he rolled balls of different weights down inclines in an attempt to
discover the truth about falling bodies. For these and other experiments, Galileo is
considered by many to be the first scientist.
Galileo was not the first person to conduct experiments or to follow the scientific method,
however. European scholars had been conducting experiments for three hundred years,
ever since a British-born Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon advocated
experimentation in the thirteenth century. One of Bacon’s books, Perspectiva (Optics)
challenges ancient Greek ideas about vision and includes several experiments with light
that include all seven steps of the scientific method.
Born in Basra (located in what is now Iraq) in 965, Ibn al-Haytham—known in the West
as Alhazen or Alhacen—wrote more than 200 books and treatises on a wide range of
subjects. He was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch
mathematics known as analytic geometry.
Ibn al-Haytham’s use of experimentation was an outgrowth of his skeptical nature and his
Muslim faith. He believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To
discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to allow the universe to speak for
itself. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and,
following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” Ibn al-Haitham wrote in Doubts
Concerning Ptolemy, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions
what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.”
To test his hypothesis that “lights and colors do not blend in the air,” for example, Ibn al-
Haytham devised the world's first camera obscura, observed what happened
when light rays intersected at its aperture, and recorded the results. This is just one of
dozens of “true demonstrations,” or experiments, contained in Kitāb al-Manāzir.