No, the only the theory that was any good for what Alhazen was interested in, like reflection, refraction, rainbows, why the Sun got big at sunset, was the theory that said "light did come into your eye
from all the objects around you".
"True," said Alhazen, "and the reason it doesn't confuse your eye, is because the rays act selectively.
Objects do send off rays, but only the ones going straight into your eyes, the so-called centric rays make you see.
The ones that come in at an angle, get bent, defracted, so you don't see them.
And, big, near objects make more of those rays than little distant ones.
So, you end up, overall, with a visual pyramid of rays coming in from everything out-there and, converging on your eye."
Blindingly obvious to you, knockout theoretical physics to the 15th century students here.
Including one from Florence, a fellow called Paolo Toscanelli, who thought the sun rose and set on Alhazen.
Some time around 1424, Toscanelli, on the right, was out to dinner, back in Florence when he met an architect called Brunelleschi, who was one of those people trying to do bigger and better than the ancient Romans,
so he had a problem.
Toscanelli, with his theoretical science background, was a godsend.
Toscanelli had ideas based on all that optical theory he had learnt in Padua, that might give architects the help they all needed.
You remember that Ptolemy atlas the Florentines had brought back from Greece, with grids all over it?
Toscanelli came across things in the Atlas that were right up Brunelleschi's street.
Like how Ptolemy had used grids as a standard unit of measure, and how he must have used optical theory to get the foreshortening effect of the grids that would recreate the effects of the Earth's curving surface.
The same optical theory that Alhazen had developed, you recall, about the way rays of light came into the eye from outside.
And how the way you saw things was something that could be handled with geometry and maths.
You can guess what must have been going through Brunelleschi's mind as he watched Toscanelli.
If he could understand enough of this fancy geometry to produce some kind of blueprint, his troubles might be over, because he could get a proper scientific grip on things he was trying to build.
Including a crazy scheme he had taken on, to give the Florentines something even bigger than the Romans had managed,
to put the biggest dome ever built on their unfinished cathedral.
He had this imaginative way of doing it.
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