I heard about this series on BBC 4 when listening to the Guardian Science Weekly podcast recently. They had the presenter and physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, on the show talking about some of the great discoveries and advances made in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th Centuries.

Think about it this way – if it has an ‘al’ at the beginning, there’s a fair bet that it was discovered, invented or pushed forward in the Islamic world: algebra, algorithms, alkali, alcohol…

Alhazen (Ibn al-Haythem) is considered one of the founders of the scientific method which we still use today – a good scientist formulates a hypothesis and devises a method to prove it wrong. In this way, we know if a scientific idea stands up to testing. If not, we need to revise the hypothesis and test again.

You can see the official BBC page for the programme here, but the video may no longer be available to download. Alternatively, pick up the episodes (broken into parts), from YouTube:

1: The Language of Science

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

2: The Empire of Reason

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

3: The Power of Doubt

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

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To find out more about Science and the Islamic world, try some of these resources:

1001 Inventions: a great resource for Science and Tech discoveries

Go there!

Good Wikipedia article

Timeline of Science and Islam

Guardian Science posdcast: Islam and Science