Ibn Al Haytham's Scientific Method

The Islamic Golden Age was a period of massive advancements and exchanges of scientific discovery in the middle ages. The process for theorising, testing, and analyzing through experimentation is known as the scientific method. For thousands of years, ways to systematically test phenomena to understand them have led to scientific breakthroughs. Discussions of Scientific methodology have roots back to ancient Egypt and Babylon, but also independently emerged in ancient India,among both Hindu and Buddhist philosophers. 

Likewise, scientific methods were a major subject among ancient Greek philosophers and physicians. Most important would be Aristotle, who developed methods of both deductive and inductive reasoning, and the often underappreciated Democritus,who wrote extensively of the existence of atoms, an object of matter which could not be broken down further, breaking reality into its constituent parts.

 This was all theory, however, and in the Islamic world, theory met with testing to develop the earliest experimental methods. Here, the idea of running experiments and using measurement to test different hypotheses came into its own. Many of the great thinkers of the Islamic Golden age were polymaths and generalists, so many names will appear again and again as they worked in different areas of study.

 One great developer of experimental methods is one of the great minds of the age, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham. al-Haytham was born in what would be modern-day Iraq, and did much of his work serving as vizier, or political advisor, to the BuyidEmirate. Using logical reasoning combined with empirical experimentation, he disagreed with many Greek philosophers on the nature of light and vision,which we will discuss later. al-Haytham saw himself on a quest for truth above all else, noting that it is difficult to find and a hard path to make the journey.

 He practised a process of relentless scepticism and finding the truth through observation. This thinking is an early form of positivism,or the theory that knowledge about natural phenomena can only be derived through observationand reason. Furthermore, al-Haytham's writings indicate form of using the principle of Occam's Razor, or choosing the option with the fewest number of assumptions when selecting between different explanations for phenomena. He often pointed out frustration with the lack of development of such thought in ancient Greek texts. 

What al-Haytham did through this work introducesthe idea of induction to scientific methods. As opposed to deductive reasoning, where one removes possible explanations for phenomena until only one remains, induction builds collection of evidence and uses reason to find a theory which is the best explanation given what's at hand. This thinking is the philosophy behind modern science. Another developer of the scientific methodin this age was the Persian scientist Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. 

He took an even greater interest in systematic experimentation to find natural principles. al-Biruni made much emphasis on the repeatability of experiments, a cornerstone of the modern scientific method. He showed concern with making sure to prevent bias in observation, and so often repeated experiments many times. al-Biruni desired to make averages of outcomes to compensate for the errors inherent with tools and the humans who used them. 

These advances would find the basis of scientific development throughout the middle ages, and the scientific method would not go through further development until well into the 12th century, a hundred years later.