• Seeing With New Eyes: Ibn Al Haytham, Optics and Foreignness

    When we think of the science of optics we may think of Isaac Newton, who together with his other discoveries, made important studies in the field of optics. We are far less likely to think of the breakthroughs in optics and science made by Ibn Al Haytham, a scientist who lived in the Islamic world in the tenth century. To Europe he was known as Alhacen or Alhazen. Al Haytham largely solved a scientific problem that had frustrated previous thinkers for more than a thousand years.   How do we see?  The problem stretched back to the time of Aristotle. Aristotle spoke Greek.  Al Haytham’s work was written in Arabic and…