Talk:Ibn al-Shatir

message: :[Ibn Shater departed] from the Ptolemaic system in a way very similar to what Copernicus later also did. Ibn Shater hypothesized that the earth was not the center of the universe and proved it by trigonometric means. Later on, Copernicus restated this theory to the Europeans.
If this is not intended to give the impression that Ibn Shater deserves credit for heliocentrism in place of Copernicus, then it is very badly worded indeed. If it is, it is not supported by any of the works cited. 
Ibn al-Shatir did important astronomical work, and his solution for removing equants was also used at one time by Copernicus, though not in his final formulation. There is no sort of evidence that Copernicus knew of the earlier work, and opinions are divided. Nor was al-Shatir's system heliocentric. (See the Gingerich citation.) 
Why is it better to make misleading or false assertions than to give al-Shatir the credit he deserves? I'm undertaking to fix this, but we need (as I have said so many times before) someone who knows Islamic science to do it right. The lashings-out of partisans are not useful in Wikipedia, even when they are in behalf of historically neglected areas. --Dandrake 00:12, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
: Indeed this statement is incorrect.  There is no evidence that ibn al-Shatir ever considered a heliocentric system.  As much as I admire the work of Saliba, especially on this issue, his failure to recount Copernicus' history on the subject kind of taints his analysis.  Copernicus proposed the heliocentric system before 1514 based on very scant empirical data.  In other words, it was just a pure insight -- probably the result of reading Martianus Capella and simply extending his idea.  His small circle of friends were intrigued and wanted Copernicus to write up a more formal treatise on the matter.  Copernicus, probably realizing he had no supporting analysis or evidence for his theory, then appears to have sought out the very latest in astronomical treatise' and probably obtained a copy of the works of al-Shatir and Tusi.  We know it happened in this order because Guillame Postel, presumably Copernicus' source for the Arab works, was only 4 years old in 1514.  So he would not have obtained ibn al-Shatir's models until a more realistic date between 1530 and 1540.
: Copernicus, without fully understanding the technical details of ibn al-Shatir, probably then discovered to his delight, that indeed all the planetary models could be scaled such that one of their epicycles was very near to the orbit of the sun around the earth.  So then he just subtracted that epicycle from everything (including the earth!) and voila!  So he then proceeded to document this, by first reproducing ibn al-Shatir's models (slightly incorrectly, because he didn't or couldn't do all the math that ibn al-Shatir did) then showed how his heliocentric model was in observational agreement with his models by doing this sun-orbit-epicycle subtraction.  I have not read these materials myself, so I cannot say with any certainty that this was Copernicus' thinking.  But such analysis would have been available to him. Qed (talk) 14:40, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Could someone document the claim that Ibn al-Shatir was responsible for the separation of astronomy from natural philosophy?  The separation of the two was already clear at the time of the philosopher Aristotle, who clearly differentiated the role of astronomy as providing knowledge of the fact (scientia quia), from that of philosophy which provided knowledge of the cause of the fact (scientia propter quid); and the astronomer Ptolemy, who wrote of mathematical astronomy in his Almagest and Handy Tables, and of physical cosmology and the causes of celestial motions in his Planetary Hypotheses.  --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 03:53, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separation of Astronomy from Natural Philosophy? 

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* :Ibn al-Shatir: 
Johnuniq (talk) 11:32, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm about to start looking at this (which will likely amount to ripping out the dodgy stuff) William M. Connolley (talk) 22:05, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misuse of sources 

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