ibn al Haytham and the Invention of Science

Although many sources report that Francis Bacon developed the Scientific Method, ibn al-Haytham was writing about it and using it hundreds of years before bacon was born.

Cropped version of the frontispiece of Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia, depicting Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)

Ibn al-Haytham was born in Basra, Iraq in approximately 965 C.E. He was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician in what is called the Islamic Golden Age. He was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflects off of an object and enters the eye, and the first to recognize that vision happens in the brain. He made major contributions to many fields and opened the door to our modern study of optics.

For our purposes in this text, we remember him for his creation of the scientific method, or perhaps a scientific thought process. Simply put, ibn al-Haytham stated that an idea must be proved by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence.