mansamusa

Pretty sweeping statement to make. But was Newton really so superior to contemporary thinkers like Leibniz? For instance the Law of Gravity is believed to be derived largely from Kepler's 3rd law and Huygens’s formula for centrifugal acceleration. Newton himself admits:

“…I began to think of gravity extending to the Orb of the Moon and (having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving presses the surface of a sphere) from Kepler’s rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve….” (Westfall, 143).

And also, is it not true that Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren claimed to have done the same thing at the time? Namely by substituting the laws of Huygens formula with Kepler's 3rd Law. To me this would seem to be a discovery resulting from an accumulation of scientific knowledge as oppossed to the result of some singular genius. So I do not know why you boast about Newton being greater than all of non-European science or European science of the Middle Ages, as if Newton lived in a historical vacuum of some sort.

And in regards to calculus, I think we all are aware of the claim that Leibniz beat Newton to it. Leibniz who accussed Newton of having an occult notion of what gravity is. And for good reason; here is Newton on Gravity, in his Opticks:

“Have not the small particles of bodies certain powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance…. How those attractions may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by Impulse, or some other means unknown to me.”

In a matter of fact, Newton was in many ways one of the world's last alchemist. You know that branch of Magic and science originating from the Middle Ages.

Why bother compare Greek science to Middle Eastern science? I thought they were all part of the Western Eurasian Cultural complex. Should you really be encouraging this kind of civil or internal warfare and division within such a ridiculously monolithic entity such as Western Eurasia? Especially when we are speaking about scientists most of whom looked liked Alexander Siddig:

jehosafats

One glaring omission on the timeline for "Islamic" mathematicians: Ibn al-Yasamin. He was active in Sevilla and Marraskesh in the latter half of the 12th century. He had a clear influence on Fibonacci's libro d’abbaco.

Lazyman

Well I just copied the wiki list .

jehosafats

I was referring to the list Guaporense posted. He made several mistakes but that's neither here nor there.

Guaporense

The Western Eurasian world, formerly unified under the Roman Empire was divided into two parts:

The Islamic part and the Christian part.

During the early middle ages up to the 14th century the Islamic part remained far more important in terms of scientific production.

The reason was that with the decline of Roman civilization, starting around 100 AD an continuing until the 8th century, the decline was not uniform over the territory of the Roman Empire: The European parts of the Roman Empire declined by a greater margin than the Middle Eastern parts of the Empire. This is revealed by the archaeological evidence: all regions of the Empire, from the Middle East to Europe show declining levels of pollution and population, indicating declining population, declining economic activity and declining per capita levels of economic activity.

The parts of the Empire that declined the least were Egypt and Syria, which became the centers of Medieval Islamic civilization. The parts that declined the most were Italy and the Aegean.

The Islamic lead in sciences during the Early and High Middle Ages was fundamentally caused by their better starting point by 650 AD.

However, due to greater amounts of arable land and thanks to the development of a city state culture (the city state culture of Northern Italy in the late middle ages), Christian Europe developed a greater population and greater levels of economic and social development and hence by the late middle ages managed to get ahead of the Islamic world in terms of scientific output and by the 15-16th centuries their lead became overwhelming.

1 - The lack of city states in the Islamic world.

2 - The lack of political decentralization, correlated with the lack of city states: we had first the Caliphate and them the Ottomans dominating the whole Islamic world. Political centralization is not good for scientific development: for example, the Roman Empire killed the science of the Hellenistic world.

3 - Lack of demographic potential: the middle east has bounded land supply. Europe has much greater amounts of arable land.

4 - A closed mediterranean: with the Arab invasions the mediterranean sea was cut in half and as result trade in the great commercial highway of antiquity was closed. Europe managed to bypass this problem later on though the Atlantic. Modern European civilization is an Atlantic civilization.

Lord_of_Gauda

Nothing more than complete eurocentric nonsense.
no scientific development- hell, no single conceptual development of mankind, comes anywhere close to comparing the impact of the Indian numeral system. That- a system using numbers zero to 9 in combination to represent all conceivable arithmetic, along with the decimal system (again, invented by Indians) is of far greater consequence than any single discovery.

Thanks to the decimal and Indian numeral system, modern economics is possible. Without the former, there is absolutely no possibility of complex arithmetic that is essential to the development of the stock market system and the western lifestyle.

Not to mention, no one thought dominates the entire spectrum of mankind as much as the Indian arithmetic system: from the mathematicians and economists of the western world, down to the illierate hunter-gatherer in Borneo, the Indian arithmetic system has penetrated over 99% of human population, with its impact being felt daily.

You don't use euclidian space or any other concept on a daily basis as you do with Indian arithmetic. That applies to 99% of the 7 billion people that inhabit the planet today.

There is no concept in human history- not even religion, God or anything- that remotely compares to the level of universal outreach of the Indian numeral system and its daily impact on the overwhelming majority of human populace.


[/quote]
Actually, it was the Greeks that invented the first heliocentric model of the universe:

Aristarchus of Samos.

While 1,700 years later that Copernicus managed to finally make a popular heliocentric model of the universe.[/QUOTE]


False. The Sumerians, Indians, Egyptians, etc. were all prior to the Greeks to conclude that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Indians even went as far as to make the astoundingly foreseeing and correct conclusion that stars are no different from our sun, just much further away.

Lord_of_Gauda

The lack of historical knowledge that you base your conclusions on, is astounding. No political decentralization in the Islamic world ? With this statement along, you demonstrate, that you have little or no knowledge of the political history of Islam. For after 800 CE, the Caliphate lost effective control of its territorries. Regional powers like the Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids, Alavids, Almoravids, all ruled independent of each other, paying nominal tutelage to the Caliphs, who had been reduced to puppet figures.

The history of Islam, from 800 CE to 1200 CE is fundamental study in political decentralization of the Caliphate.

Apparently the Mongols and their destruction of 90% of middle eastern demographics and institutions are irrelevant to how the middle east fell behind Europe despite leading it in technology and theoretical sciences for better part of a millenia.
LOL

jehosafats

Ibn al-Yasamin is only notable because he finally united eastern and western Mediterranean algebra using those curious Indian numerals. Several Maghrebian mathematicians during this period left a lasting impact on the field. Abu Bakr al-Hassar's notations for fractions comes to mind.

Guaporense

To give an idea of how disadvantaged the middle east was in relation to Europe in terms of population, during the 15th though 17th centuries. The same proportions applied to the late middle ages, if not earlier.

Populations:

1500 AD

Europe: 78 million
-- Western Europe: 57 million
--- France: 15 million
--- Germany: 12 million
--- Italy: 10.5 million
--- UK: 4 million
-- Eastern Europe: 21 million

Middle East: 26 million
-- Western Asia: 17.5 million
--- Anatolia: 6.3 million
--- Persia: 4 million
-- North Africa: 8.5 million
--- Egypt: 4 million

Total Western Eurasia: 104 million

1700 AD

Europe: 114 million
-- Western Europe: 81.5 million
--- France: 21.5 million
--- Germany: 15 million
--- Italy: 13.3 million
--- UK: 8.6 million
-- Eastern Europe: 32.5 million

Middle East: 30.1 million
-- Western Asia: 20.8 million
-- North Africa: 9.3 million

Total Western Eurasia: 143.1 million

Since Roman times the middle east had less than half of the population of Western Eurasia. By the late middle ages Europe had 75% while the Middle East had 25% of the population of Western Eurasia, with the proportion gradually shifting to Europe.

By 1913 AD:

Europe: 497 million
-- Western Europe: 261 million
-- Eastern Europe: 236 million

European offshots: 175 million
-- North America: 106 million
-- Latin America: 63 million
-- Oceania: 6 million

total Europe + Offshots: 672 million

Middle East: 63 million
-- Western Asia: 39 million
--- Anatolia: 15 million
--- Persia: 10 million
-- North Africa: 24 million
--- Egypt: 13 million

Also, interestingly, in 1500, in 1700 and in 1913, Western Eurasia had a larger total population than China:

1500 AD
Western Eurasia: 104 million
China: 103 million

1700 AD
Western Eurasia: 141.3 million
China: 138 million

1913 AD
Western Eurasia & Offshots: 735 million
China: 437 million

Europe's population was actually higher in 1300 AD than in 1500 AD:



Europe's demographics recovered well from the Fall of Rome. In the Middle East, by contrast, population densities never reached the Roman levels.

In 1500 AD, Anatolia had 6.3 million, Roman Anatolia had 10-12 million, Egypt had 4 million, Roman Egypt had 5-6 million, the rest of North Africa had 4.5 million, Roman North Africa had 7-8 million (http://www.historum.com/ancient-hist...tml#post798819).

The Roman era Middle East had 35 to 40 million inhabitants. The Roman era Europe had 40 to 50 million inhabitants. Europe's population surpassed the Roman levels quickly, already in the 11th and 12th centuries, while the middle east only reached Roman population levels in the 19th century.

dagul

Indeed, the New World is the primary factor of Western Europe gaining much advantage against the Islamic empire lead by the Ottoman. But, for me, the Saracens must be credited by Western Europeans for dominating Mediterranean because that exclusive control of Eastern trade and the Silk Road by the Ottoman, prompted the former to engage into exploration and colonization.