Selwyn Smith

Social Worker - Politics, sociology, behavioral science, social work, ageing issues, social justice, inequality

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@aarohiyadav100 911189

[Peter FitzSimons @Peter_Fitz]

Sickening.

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Arden_2210 18

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@ElaineM11584892 Allow me to call you a cab

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@MFWitches @JennyForster7 Political hypocrisy all around

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Anna_xb2 Freddie Mercury

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Elliedvce 5

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Elliedvce 4

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An Arab scholar in 1011 was placed under house arrest in Cairo for 10 years. He used the time to invent the scientific method, prove how vision actually works, and write a 7-volume book that Newton studied 600 years later.

I read about him last night and could not stop thinking about it.

His name was Ibn al-Haytham. The book is called the "Book of Optics."

The textbook story names Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes as the founders of modern science. All three of them came 600 years after Ibn al-Haytham. All three of them studied his work directly or through Latin translations. The man who actually invented the scientific method was working alone in a single room in Cairo while Europe was still in the Dark Ages.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

He was born in Basra around 965 CE. By his 40s he had a reputation across the Arab world as one of the most original minds alive. Then he made the mistake that almost killed him. He claimed publicly that he could regulate the flooding of the Nile. The mad caliph al-Hakim of Cairo summoned him to Egypt to do it.

Ibn al-Haytham took one look at the river and realized the project was impossible with the technology of his era. The caliph had executed dozens of scholars for less. So he faked madness. The caliph believed him and put him under house arrest in his own home in Cairo for the next 10 years.

Most people would have lost their actual mind. He used the time to invent science.

Before him, knowledge worked one way. You quoted authority. If Aristotle had said it, it was true. If Galen had written it, it was correct. The role of a scholar was to memorize and defend the ancient Greeks. I

Ibn al-Haytham broke this completely. He wrote a sentence in the Book of Optics that quietly destroyed 1,400 years of intellectual culture. "The seeker after truth," he said, "is not the one who follows his natural disposition to trust the writings of the ancients. The seeker after truth is the one who suspects them, questions them, and submits only to argument and experiment."

That single sentence is the foundation of modern science. He wrote it 600 years before the European Renaissance.

The second thing he did was build the actual machinery of experimentation.

He insisted that no claim about the physical world was acceptable until it had been verified by an experiment anyone could repeat. He gave detailed instructions for every experiment in his book. He told his readers, in writing, not to take his word for any of it. Build the equipment. Run the tests yourself. Verify or destroy my claims with your own eyes.

The third thing he did was use the method to overturn one of the most settled questions in physics.

The Greeks had taught for centuries that vision worked because the eye emitted invisible rays. Ibn al-Haytham proved them wrong with a darkened room, a small hole, and a wall. The first camera obscura. He showed that light from the outside world enters the eye, the exact opposite of what every Greek thinker had taught.

Two hundred years later his book was translated into Latin in Spain. Roger Bacon cited him. Kepler cited him. Galileo's work on the telescope was built on his optics. Newton's foundational work on light rested on his framework.

Walk into any physics department today. Ask who founded the scientific method. Almost nobody will say Ibn al-Haytham.

The man who invented the way humanity actually knows things did the work under house arrest, with no funding, no laboratory, and a paranoid caliph next door waiting for an excuse to kill him.

He did it anyway. Most of the world is still pretending it was someone else's idea.

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@SoulfulSangeet @aarohiyadav100 This is wrong

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@SoulfulSangeet @aarohiyadav100 1

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@SoulfulSangeet @aarohiyadav100 24

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Gosleepriya 338

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@AFettell The conflation of antisemitism and Zionism is dividing this country. There should be restrictions to respect people's faith belief but this should not include political following. Zionism is an insidious political following driven by perpetual victimisation

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@Arden_2210 18

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@MikeCarlton01 This is absolutely shameful. The laws should never have been brought. This Zionism on steroids. Police also should not have been put in this position

[Dr Tracy Westerman AM @TracyWesterman]

Her father, Lang Hancock, said on national television in 1984 that Indigenous Australians he described as “half-castes” should be rounded up and have their water “doped up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future.” Donnell Wallam — only the third Indigenous woman ever to represent Australia in netball — privately requested that Rinehart publicly denounce those comments. Rinehart refused. Wallam was then denied an exemption from wearing the Hancock logo on her debut, and under unbearable pressure eventually agreed to wear it — at which point Rinehart pulled the $15 million sponsorship anyway, describing the players’ concerns as “virtue signalling.”
This is who funds One Nation. This is the legacy behind the money.

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@ShiannonC In WA they are trialling electric haul trucks in the mines. Working well apparently. Each diesel truck uses 400000 litres per year.
Fortescue are using an all electric train to move iron ore to the coast...1.5 klm long

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@MysterySolvents Evolved 7Up...Fuck up

[Selwyn Smith @selwynlsmith]

@TheFungi669 Oh the Freudian slip