Talk:Book of Optics

Latin version
states that latin name of the work is De aspectibus, not Perspectiva. → Aethralis 19:29, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Lead
Insofar as Alhazen used the Aristotelician intromission realist theory of sight, I wonder how one could claim that his optics "correctly explained the process of sight for the first time." Maybe another formulation would be better (except if you believe that the image projected by an object is than transmitted to the eye and then to the brain without any translation or coding... Spirals31 (talk) 23:12, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Many problems
There is much in this article that seems overly favourable to Ibn al-Haytham.

For example, Ibn al-Haytham was the first to discover that the celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter is nonsense. The celestial spheres don't exist; they are part of a long-discarded theory. ...and he also discovered that the heavens are less dense than the air. Well no, he didn't. He asserted it. And since the heavens are essentially a vacuum, he was wrong about that too. Notice how the astronomy section contradicts the scientific-method section.

he developed a method for determining the general formula for the sum of any integral powers, which was fundamental to the development of infinitesimal and integral calculus does not sound at all believable.

He speculated on electromagnetic aspects of light Are we really supposed to believe that?

This is Nikola Tesla all over again...

The article is also repetitive and seems to have suffered from cut-n-paste: His book Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) was translated... - oh dear, someone has forgotten we are in the BoO article!

William M. Connolley (talk) 22:34, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

What you believe is not important. Go ahead and read the all 6 chapters of his book and show that he in fact has not done these things. Or demand that these claims are backed with references that could be reached. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.65.95.195 (talk) 23:05, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't he also be called Persian rather than Iraqi, or at least something like "Persian (present-day Iraq)" ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.97.122.105 (talk) 06:35, 26 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The entire article is written as a love letter to Ibn al-Haytham. The entire article need a serious rewrite, because as it stands it is a blight on Wikipedia. This specific page was used as an example of the poor scholarship of Wikipedia by one of my son's teachers, and he was very correct. Supertheman  ( talk  ) 05:08, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I completely agree. In this state it is almost unusable. Typical example of the problems would be "He is the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision." This is of course untrue, as he does not do such thing. Inverted images on retina of the things seen were described as late as 17th century, also the position of the optic nerve is by Alhacen not correct. This sentence (as most of the article) leaves the the wrong impression. → Aethralis 06:32, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

It may be possible to go more in depth as to how Alhazen and other early Islamists gained insight (no pun intended) into how optics functioned in order to produce this work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SamuelBecket (talk • contribs) 06:25, 23 May 2013 (UTC)


 * There's some information in the Alhazen article, which I've largely "cleaned up" now (although I still haven't finished). I'm afraid adding extra information to the Book of Optics is quite a long way down my list of things to do when I have time. If you can find sourced information yourself, feel free to add it! There may be detail you can get from the old, much longer version of the page (check the history), although you will need to independently confirm any information you find because of the known issues with misuse of sources. --Merlinme (talk) 07:53, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Tags
I hung the tags on the article as most of it is about the author and his other works not the book. I plan on "hacking" out everthing not about the book its selfJ8079s (talk) 21:15, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I said I would But I still haven't. Main stream sources are available There is no need for fringe sources J8079s (talk) 02:27, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I even have half the relevant sources sitting on my shelves here but I'm caught up looking at Islamic Neoplatonism and evolution right now, so this article won't come to the top of my to-do list for a while yet. Though if anyone needs a particular reference checking, I'm happy to do that at any time.
 * All the best. –Syncategoremata (talk) 09:13, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Composition Date
Composition date listed here appears to be wrong. A.I. Sabra (arguably the foremost scholar of this period) places its composition "at any rate, after AD 1028." See Sabra, A.I. 2003. "Ibn al-Haytham's Revolutionary Project in Optics: The Achievement and the Obstacle." In The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perpesctives, The MIT Press. Quote from page 90. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.74.15.238 (talk) 19:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Lens
The article states that Sami Hamarneh writes several examples of Ibn al-Haytham's descriptions which are correct according to modern optics: ... 5. He stated that the lens is that part of the eye where vision is felt first, but this is plainly incorrect according to modern optics. Even accounting for the dated language, the lens doesn't "feel" anything. The functional part of the eye is the retina. This is the organ of sensation in the eye. Harmarneh may have stated that, but it's wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Famousdog (talk • contribs) 12:37, 7 April 2010


 * Rather bizarrely, especially for something published in Isis, that claim is exactly as made in the cited source. But as you say, it is patent nonsense as written. —Syncategoremata (talk) 13:08, 7 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for noting that. Reading Hamarneh's review of Hakim Mohammed Said's Ibn al- Haitham. Proceedings of the celebration of the 1000th Anniversary held under the auspices of Hamdard National Foundation, Karachi, Pakistan in Isis, it looks like he's taking the claim that Alhacen's view of the lens is modern from somewhere in the volume of collected essays he's reviewing.  Hamarneh seems to have been insufficiently critical and his assertion could best be answered by citing some alternative sources such as David Lindberg, A. I. Sabra, or Mark Smith.  --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 12:47, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

"Presentist bias" in sources
I was recently reading Mark Smith's review of Sabra's ''The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham. Books I, II, II: On Direct Vision. in The British Journal for the History of Science'', 25 (1992): 358-359, and came across this cautionary note about Sabra's "presentist bias".


 * "I would have found Sabra's analysis virtually unexceptionable were it not for what strikes me as a somewhat presentist bias in his evaluation of both the scientific implications and historical context of Ibn al-Haytham's work. Take, for example, his claim that 'with the addition of measurement Book III would have been indistinguishable in character from a modern book in experimental psychology' (vol. 2, p. 142). Perhaps so, but I think Sabra's comparison is facile, in great part because it depends on a conflation of experimentalism with empiricism. It is of course true that Ibn al-Haytham's method in the first three books of the 'Optics' is fundamentally empirical. It is equally true that he has recourse to numerous experiments, some quite elaborate. But by modern standards these experiments are negligible in terms both of theoretical scope and of demonstrated effects. Not unexpectedly, in fact, Ibn al-Haytham's experimentalism has far more in common with that of Ptolemy than with that of Pavlov or Skinner. Thus, while Sabra's tendency to 'modernize' Ibn al-Haytham serves to highlight the purported uniqueness and significance (as well as rightness) of his contribution, it also serves to wrench him slightly out of proper historical focus – which presumably accounts for Sabra's offhanded and, I think, fundamentally wrongheaded dismissal of Aristotle as a key source for the 'Optics' (cf. vol. 2, p. 85)."

It seems Sabra should be cited with some caution. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 13:08, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

To do List
*The pinhole camera appears in ""The Shape of the Eclipse not the Book of Optics''(the "beam chamber" tansmits light not images)
 * At some point we need to mention that his theory vision is wrong.(In his theory light, color, and "forms" enter the eye separately. Light and color are felt by the glacier humor and the form is tansmited via the hollow optic nerve to the folds of the brain which feels them.)
 * Bradley Steffens (2006), Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist Morgan Reynolds Publishing, ISBN 1599350246 This is a children's book cited 17 times. better sources are available.
 * Nicholas J. Wade, Stanley Finger (2001), "The eye as an optical instrument: from camera obscura to Helmholtz's perspective", Perception 30 (10), p. 1157-1177. Needs to be checked
 * J8079s (talk) 17:04, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

The Arabic script in this article and other articles with Arabic script is written from left to right, while Arabic is written from right to left. Some one with access to an Arabic word processor should correct it. 13 September 2010 (MKT) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.137.128.48 (talk) 00:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
 * addressed one item in this list. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 14:38, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

edits for pinhole camera
The term pinhole camera can be edited out if the following is taken into account:
 * the translations use the phrase 'darkened room'
 * the size of the aperture can influence the amount of illumination.
 * It seems clear the experiments occurred both night and day
 * Alhazen's geometric diagrams then reduce down to the source image and its projection through the aperture
 * if the amount of illumination, say in a darkened room (the camera obscura) allows the presence of an observer, the projected image can be first observed, and then projected.
 * if we assume the pinhole is the size of a lentil (hence the word lens), then this reduces down to some simple experiments to tone down the article.
 * an observer would then be free to move within the darkened room, moving from, say the aperture (the pinhole) to the plane of projection.
 * since a human observer can detect light across orders of magnitude of intensity of illumination, and since Alhazen discusses only the fact of projection, this then changes questions about the intensity of illumination to existence of images on the plane of projection.

If the claims are toned down, then the term pinhole camera need never occur in the article. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 01:08, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Stub and rework
For background information, please see RFC/U and Cleanup. With 227 edits, User:Jagged 85 is the main contributor to this article by far (2nd: 7 edits). The article has been tagged for nearly two years. The issues are a repeat of what had been exemplarily shown here, here, here or here. As the article has been created by Jagged 85 on 18 June 2007, there is no prior version to revert to. For this reason it needs to be stubbed completely. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 00:27, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Publication history and titles
The list of translated titles includes Persian and Italian translations of the title. I suggest limiting the titles to forms in which the book was actually published at some point in its history. The Library of Congress gives the titles Kitāb al-Manāẓir‎ for the original Arabic version De aspectibus for the Medieval Latin translation. It does not give an English title for the modern English translations from the Arabic and Latin, and doesn't list Italian or Persian translations. Opticae thesaurus (treasury of optics) is the title for Risner's collected Latin edition of the optical works of Alhacen and Witelo's treatise on optics. The Persian title is especially problematic (unless the book was at one time published under that title) given the ongoing controversy over Alhacen's ethnicity.

A useful addition to this article would be a publication history listing all significant published editions. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:25, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

re stub
transcluded from Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Jagged 85 : Just to let you know the Book of Optics article with Jagged's content was restored by an IP a few months ago. I did some fixing since then (without being aware of this), but the fixes were very limited in scope, so I would support a re-stub even though it would remove my work as well. Arc de Ciel (talk) 04:47, 17 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I've restored it to the version before the "unstubbbing". You will presumably want to put back in some of your edits. I'm a little concerned with the state of it as it was even at that stage. Has somebody actually checked the sources cited? i.e. D. C. Lindberg (1976), Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, pp. 60-7, "Rosanna Gorini (2003). "Al-Haytham the Man of Experience. First Steps in the Science of Vision", International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine. Institute of Neurosciences, Laboratory of Psychobiology and Psychopharmacology, Rome, Italy.", "Rüdiger Thiele (2005). "In Memoriam: Matthias Schramm", Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15, p. 329–331. Cambridge University Press." I've modified a very Jagged_85 sounding sentence which manages to imply that Al-Hazen invented intromission theory, as opposed to doing experiments which supported it. --Merlinme (talk) 07:42, 17 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Good job guys a lot more work needs to be done.J8079s (talk) 14:37, 17 September 2012 (UTC)


 * All I had really done was tone down some of the more exceptional claims and remove some unreliable sources, so it's mostly gone. :-) I might look over the previous versions later and add back some information that can be verified. I've gone further and removed the third paragraph though. The Gorini reference is one of the unreliable references that I had previously removed; the other but it doesn't seem like the usual kind of reference you would use (a eulogy?) and I can't find a copy of it online.


 * I can't find reference 2; I took out "founding modern physical optics" based on the first sentence of the physical optics article, which says that the field studies phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid - and Alhazen definitely didn't go beyond geometric optics. Reference 1 is on Google Books here, and I can't find the "first" claim so I'm removing it. It does seem like a reliable source though, and it has a lot of information which could be used for the expansion of this and other articles. Also a comment that I think the "landmark" claim is justified, and I've heard him referred to as "father of modern optics" before - but of course, we need the (reliable) sources. Arc de Ciel (talk) 06:49, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Good work, thanks. If there's a reference added by Jagged_85 and you can't verify it, DELETE IT. This cannot be emphasised enough. I've wasted far too many hours of my life nailing down sources; I can assure you from bitter experience they almost never support the exceptional claim. When in doubt, delete.
 * What's particularly irritating about Jagged_85's edits as that he takes important works and important historical figures and exaggerates everything so much you can't be sure what's true and what's not. Any exceptional claims which can be verified easily can of course stay in. --Merlinme (talk) 08:35, 18 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Hmm. The source is also used in a few other articles: Alhazen, Scientist, and List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field. Perhaps the source was already checked when going over one of these articles? Otherwise I would agree to removal. Arc de Ciel (talk) 18:01, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Editing
I have undertaken the task of editing this page. I realize that I will not be able to make the article completely whole, but I will try and improve it. This is a list of sources I will be using. Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg, Reconfiguring the World by Margaret J. Osler, The Remarkable Ibn al-Haytham by John D. Smith, The Mathematical Gazette and "Ibn Al-Haytham, Abū ʿAlī Al-Ḥasan Ibn Al-Ḥasan." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 6. Khan ali10 (talk) 21:33, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The first part of the edit will be to slightly improve the quality of the general introduction of the article. After the general description I will go into al-Haytham's theory on the physics of light and how it works which is necessary for understanding how the eyes view objects. After this I will describe the theories of intromission and extramission of vision and the differences between them and his arguments for the intromission theory. After this I will expand upon al-Haytham's own theories which are written in Optics and relay the ideas as he did in his book. This will be the densest part of the article which contains much of the information found in his book. I will also explore what al-Haytham believed the structure of the eye was in his Optics Khan ali10 (talk) 02:38, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Great! I'll look forward to seeing your work. --Merlinme (talk) 16:15, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I look forward to seeing your work. May I suggest a few scholarly articles that focus a little more deeply on the content of the Book of Optics.  Smith's article is on the web and Lindberg's should be easily available if you have access to a university library:
 * Smith edited and translated the Latin version of Alhacen's Book of Optics and, as one of Lindberg's students, follows in the same historiographical tradition. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:51, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Smith edited and translated the Latin version of Alhacen's Book of Optics and, as one of Lindberg's students, follows in the same historiographical tradition. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:51, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Smith edited and translated the Latin version of Alhacen's Book of Optics and, as one of Lindberg's students, follows in the same historiographical tradition. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:51, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I have edited this article to the best of my ability within the time allotted to me. I realize that my editing has in no way made this article complete, as the Book of Optics is a very profound book that touches on many subjects. I hope that everyone will find my additions as valuable information and that others will look to add even more information and expand the article in the areas that I was not able to cover. With the collaboration of a few people this article can be made whole. My work is in no way perfect or complete. Khan ali10 (talk) 22:58, 4 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much, that's a great improvement. There was a signficant amount of material I wasn't aware of before, which is what one always hopes for in an encyclopedia article.
 * One minor Wikipedia point: please could you add a meaningul Edit summary to your edits. This helps distingish useful edits from vandalism, and also helps other editors get some idea of what you're changing.
 * Thanks again. --Merlinme (talk) 10:14, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Refs
I think these are the same source can anyone confirm this? J8079s (talk) 15:47, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Perspectivists
This edit adds a new source to Alhazen's influence on "the perspectivists." However, Smith and Lindberg used the term to refer to the medieval scholastics who investigated and taught perspectiva, while El Bizri appears to refer to renaissance painters who employed perspective in their work. Someone should disambiguate this discussion. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 22:06, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
 * OK, I did it myself and found that el Bizri says "Ibn al-Haitham's… influential legacy established the principal foundations of medieval perspectivae in the European traditions, and through them, it grounded the Renaissance theories of vision and perspective." He seems to span both traditions so the edit seems acceptable. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 22:31, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

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