balance The making of humanity Robert Briffault Publisher G Allen Unwin ltd 1919 Original from the University of California Digitized Oct 18 2007 It must be admitted that in recoil from the general conspiracy of silence of our histories several writers who have sought to vindicate the claims of Arab culture have somewhat exaggerated the achievements of Arabian science Against such loose panegyrics it has been objected that Arab science produced no surpassing genius and no transcending discovery that it was derived from extraneous sources That is substantially true but entirely irrelevant Arab astronomy did not forestall Copernicus or Newton though without it there would have been no Copernicus and no Newton Although the complexity of the Ptolemaic system was repeatedly criticized by Moorish astronomers although Al Zarkyal declared the planetary orbits to be ellipses and not circles although the orbit of Mercury is in Al Farani s tables actually represented as elliptical although Muhammad Ibn Musa glimpsed in his works on Astral Motion and The Force of Attraction the law of universal gravitation those adumbrations of the truth were not fruitful of any great reform The only important facts brought to light by Arabian astronomy the discovery of the movements of the sun s apogee by Al Batani and of the secondary variations of the moon s motion by Abu 1 Wafa exercised no perceptible influence upon the course of research and had to be rediscovered by Tycho Ibn Sina is said to have employed an air thermometer and1 Ibn Yunis certainly did use the pendulum for the measurement of time but neither of those devices which were independently re introduced by Galileo can be counted as a contribution to the growth of science That however is entirely beside the point The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories science owes a great deal more to Arab culture it owes its existence The ancient world was as we saw pre scientific The astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture The Greeks systematized generalized and theorized but the patient ways of investigation the accumulation of positive knowledge the minute methods of science detailed and prolonged observation experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient classical world What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry of new methods of investigation of the method of experiment observation measurement of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs Is Briffault s writing wp npov Not when cut and pasted only when taken in context The emphasis in this quote is mine however wp rs will show that systems and theories of science in the middle ages are those of Aristotle Archimedes Galen Ptolemy and Euclid As for the spirit and methods we need a more neutral tone