User:OsteWiki/History of science

This was the period (8th–14th century CE) of the Islamic Golden Age where commerce thrived, and new ideas and technologies emerged such as the importation of papermaking from China, which made the copying of manuscripts inexpensive. That being said, this was not the only point in time during which the Islamic world contributed to the history of science.

Advancements in Astronomy
Due religious relationships with the moon, islamic scholars had many questions regarding the solar system and turned too math to figure it out. As many holidays are reliant upon the phases of the moon, accurate time keeping called for a better understanding of astronomy. Astronomers turned away from astrologers of the time, focusing on mathematical equations which explained the heavens as accurately as they could with the knowledge of the time. The use of arithmetic and algebra determined that previous understandings of the solar system were wrong, although it still took some time for the scholars to determine what was correct. Early solar tables show the belief of the time that the sun moved around the earth which was thought to be the center of the universe. The fact that the sun remained still while the earth circled it was not posited until 1512 when Copernicus suggested as much in a manuscript regarding the motions of the planets. This was only a theory at the time however, and was not immediately accepted as the truth.

Decline
Islamic science began its so called decline in the 12th–13th century, before the Renaissance in Europe, due in part to the Christian reconquest of Spain and the Mongol conquests in the East in the 11th–13th century. The Mongols sacked Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid caliphate, in 1258, which ended the Abbasid empire. Nevertheless, many of the conquerors became patrons of the sciences. Hulagu Khan, for example, who led the siege of Baghdad, became a patron of the Maragheh observatory. However even with Mongol influence, Islamic astronomy continued to flourish into the 16th century. The decline of the Islamic Golden Age was not so much the end of Islamic science due to a fault of Islamic thinking, but the result of the overlap of these invasions, a 1250 drought, and a series of epidemics.