History Of Particle Theory: Between Darwin And Shakespeare. Paul H Frampton
the late 5th to early 6th century), and several subsequent Christian and Muslim thinkers, Enneads greatly influenced Western and Near-Eastern thought. Neoplatonism influenced mainstream theological concepts within religions, such as the work on duality of the one in two metaphysical states that laid the foundation for Christian notions of Jesus being both god and man, a foundational idea in Christian theology.
Al-Farabi’s cosmology is essentially based upon three pillars: Aristotelian metaphysics of causation, highly developed Plotinian cosmology, and the Ptolemaic astronomy. In his model, the universe is viewed as a number of concentric circles: the outermost sphere or ‘first heaven’, the sphere of fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and finally the Moon. The centre of these concentric circles inside the Moon’s orbit contains the material world. It is a more elaborate form of Fig. 5 in Chapter 1.
In the Dark Ages, both Christian Fathers and Muslim philosophers were concerned about the role of God and the creation of the universe, and accepted the concept of “duality”. Contemporary physicists also use that word: wave–particle duality in Bohr’s quantum mechanics, “triality” as an extended form in the heyday of the eight-fold way, and T–S duality and ADS/CFT correspondence in string theory. Among these usages, the most profound one is the wave–particle duality that is discussed in Chapter 5.
In the Islamic world, some aspects of fundamentals of mechanics were also studied, which is however dwarfed by Newtonian mechanics and universal gravitation. In the 6th century, John Philoponus (c. 490–570) rejected the Aristotelian view of motion. However, unlike Galileo, Philoponus did not have the unfortunate peril of sitting in front of inquisitors. He argued instead that an object acquires an inclination to move when it has a motive power impressed on it. More interesting is the statement of Ibn Sina (980–1037) that a moving object has “force” which is dissipated by external agents like air resistance. Ibn Sina distinguished between ‘force’ and ‘inclination’ (mayl); he claimed that an object gained mayl when the object is in opposition to its natural motion. His mayl is potential energy under current understanding. But, he did not invent an appropriate device to prove his statement.
In the Islamic world, there was great progress in practical applications, e.g. in geology, astronomy, and engineering. As mentioned above, astronomy became a major discipline within Islamic science. Another was astrology, predicting events with the best knowledge for going to war or founding a city. Al-Battani (850–922) accurately determined the length of the solar year. He contributed to the Tables of Toledo, used by astronomers to predict the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. Six centuries later, Copernicus (1473–1543) used these astronomic tables. Al-Zarqali (1028–1087) developed a more accurate astrolabe, used for centuries afterward. He constructed a water clock in Toledo, and discovered that the Sun’s apogee moves slowly relative to the fixed stars, and obtained a good estimate of its motion by its rate of change. Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–1274) in Persia wrote an important revision to Ptolemy’s 2nd-century celestial model. When Tusi became Helagu’s astrologer, he was given an observatory and gained access to Chinese techniques and observations. He developed trigonometry as a separate field, and compiled the most accurate astronomical tables available at that time.
But, the historian of science Bertrand Russell took the view8 that Islamic science lacked the intellectual energy required for innovation, and was chiefly important for preserving ancient knowledge and handing it on to medieval Europe, while admirable in many technical ways. Transfer of Indian/Arabic numerals to medieval Europe may be his basis of judgement, but al-Farabi’s understanding of Aristotle is a fundamental intellectual understanding. So, recently, there has been a revisionist view, exemplified by theoretical physicist Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam,9 George Saliba,10 and John M. Hobson,11 that a Muslim scientific revolution occurred during the Middle Ages. Scholars such as Donald Routledge Hill12 and Ahmad Y. Hassan13 argue that Islam was the driving force behind these scientific achievements. Here, it is worthwhile to cite Gustavo Branco’s comment14 that in recent years physics in the Mediterranean region was not as progressive as that in the Nothern Europe because of the influence of the Catholicism forbidding free thinking. In a sense, Hill and Hassan point out that in the Islamic world there was not that much prohibition of free thinking.
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1K. Bird and M. J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage Book Company, 2006).
2S. Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2011).
3S. M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2003).
4S. M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2003).
5The views of the church fathers of Hexahemeron are reviewed in Appendix 7 of Volume X of the Blackfriars edition of The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., London, 1967), pp. 203–204.
6R. Bulliet, P. Crossley, D. Headrick, S. Hirsch, and L. Johnson, The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, 3rd Ed. (Houghton Mufflin, Boston, 2005), Chapter 6 “India and Southwest Asia”, p. 163, ISBN 0-618-42770-8.
7M. Singh, Subandhu (Sahitya Akademi, 1993), pp. 9–11, ISBN 81-7201-509-7.
8B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Shuster, US, 1945), Book 2, Part 2, Chapter X.
9A. Salam, H. R. Dalafi, and M. Hassan (1994). Renaissance of Sciences in Islamic Countries (World Scientific, Singapore, 1994), p. 162, ISBN 9971-5-0713-7.
10G. Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam (New York University Press, 1994), ISBN 978-0-8147-8023-7.
11J. M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-521-54724-6).
12D. R. Hill, Islamic Science and Engineering (Edinburgh University Press, 1993), ISBN 978-0-7486-0455-5.
13A. Y. Hassan and D. R. Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 282.
14A private comment at Corfu, Summer 2019.
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