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Nature's rules are refreshingly free of human prejudice.~Jim Al-Khalili
That's something the scientists of the medieval Islamic world understood and articulated so well...
These scientists' quest for truth, wherever it came from, was summed up by the 9th century philosopher Al-Kindi, who said:
It is fitting for us not to be ashamed of acknowledging truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us. There is nothing of higher value than truth itself. It never cheapens, or have bases, he who seeks.
One moral emerges from this epic tale of the rise and fall of science in the Islamic world between the 9th and 15th centuries, and that is that science is the universal language of the human race.
Decimal numbers are just as useful in India as they are in Spain. Star charts drawn up in Iran speak volumes to astronomers in Northern Europe. And Newton's "Principia" is just as true in Arabic as it is in Latin or English.
What medieval Islamic scientists realized, and articulated so brilliantly, is that science is the common language of the human race. Man-made laws may vary from place to place, but nature's laws are true for all of us.
Professor of Theoretical Physics
University of Surrey
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