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The Great Contribution of Islamic Astronomers

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Bianca
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« on: August 27, 2007, 05:23:54 pm »








                                                Beginning of hay'a tradition




 
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) was a pioneer of the Muslim hay'a tradition of astronomy, presented the first critique and reform of Ptolemy's model, and laid the theoretical foundations for modern telescopic astronomy.

Between 1025 and 1028, Ibn al-Haytham (Latinized as Alhacen), began the hay'a tradition of Islamic astronomy with his Al-Shuku ala Batlamyus (Doubts on Ptolemy). While maintaining the physical reality of the geocentric model, he was the first to criticize Ptolemy's astronomical system, for relating actual physical motions to imaginary mathematical points, lines, and circles:

"Ptolemy assumed an arrangement that cannot exist, and the fact that this arrangement produces in his imagination the motions that belong to the planets does not free him from the error he committed in his assumed arrangement, for the existing motions of the planets cannot be the result of an arrangement that is impossible to exist."

Ibn al-Haytham developed a physical structure of the Ptolemaic system in his Treatise on the configuration of the World, or Maqâlah fî hay'at al-‛âlam, which became an influential work in the hay'a tradition.  In his Epitome of Astronomy, he was also the first to insist that the heavenly bodies "were accountable to the laws of physics".  The foundations of telescopic astronomy can also be traced back to Ibn al-Haytham, due to the influence of his optical studies on the later development of the modern telescope.

In 1038, Ibn al-Haytham described the first non-Ptolemaic configuration in The Model of the Motions. His reform excluded cosmology, as he developed a systematic study of celestial kinematics that was completely geometric. This in turn led to innovative developments in infinitesimal geometry.

 His reformed model was the first to reject the equant and eccentrics, free celestial kinematics from cosmology, and reduce physical entities to geometrical entities. The model also propounded the Earth's rotation about its axis, and the centres of motion were geometrical points without any physical significance, like Johannes Kepler's model centuries later.

In 1070, Abu Ubayd al-Juzjani, a pupil of Avicenna, proposed a non-Ptolemaic configuration in his Tarik al-Aflak. In his work, he indicated the so-called "equant" problem of the Ptolemic model, and proposed a solution for the problem. He claimed that his teacher Avicenna had also worked out the equant problem.
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