The Golden Age of Islam Explained By Neil deGrasse Tyson

September 11th 2001 we just had our tenth anniversary of that I happen to live three and a half blocks from what became known as Ground Zero these this image was taken outside my dining room window the North Tower is on fire these are 110 storey buildings the World Trade Center towers this image is the instant the South Tower was hit it was hit from the left you cannot see the entry point because we're blocked by this other black building it's a hotel a 50-story hotel which is just kind of in the foreground you see part of the South Tower punching out this is before the jet fuel had ignited and when you ignite jet fuel you set a deflagration wave not a not a a bomb wave it's a different kind of wave it's not accompanied by a shock this is a split second after that the fuel has ignited creating more pressure and within a split second of that the entire South Tower was engulfed and this is fragments of plane and bodies and office coming out the other side now why am i dragging you through this okay 62 minutes later both buildings had collapsed and there was blue sky where there was once these buildings this is directly outside of my apartment building and the emergency vehicles had come this is the pulverized World Trade Center dust that had settled several inches of it I say this because shortly after this this gentleman got up president of the United States George W Bush it's actually my photo of him I was in that room at that time when he spoke see the medals there on the table I was on a committee to tell him who to give those medals to through the Presidential Medal of Science and so he actually gave him to everyone we told them to give him to except he didn't read their citations he's smart enough to know not to pronounce any of the science words that were in the citation so he put two medal around the neck somebody else read the citations shortly after September 11th he gets up I don't remember where he gave the speech and he says in an attempt to distinguish we from they he says our God is the God who named the Stars this is before I was on his rolodex you know I could have saved him from himself okay it's a loose quote from Genesis that says God named all the stars in the sky okay first of all it's the same God so he's got that wrong but but Allah God of Islam and God of the the the Jewish God no it's the same God they guy they call him different names was the same book delivering you the same God apart from him getting that wrong he says our God is the God who named the stars what he he just didn't know two-thirds of all stars in the night sky have Arabic names two-thirds of all stars that have names have these all the Arabic star names all of these I don't think this is the point he wanted to make I just think he figured that out like I said was before I was on his rolodex and so you say well how does this happen how does how do you get how do you get a culture where tooth which stars in the night sky are named by them what was going on how did that happen and you have to go back a thousand years and you get to Islam in what's the golden period of Islam in that period algebra was invented algorithm is an Arabic word all these words they begin with al ten-to-one it's an Arabic word Arabic with our numerals our Arabic numerals did you pause and reflect on why we call them Arabic numerals we just call them that right but somebody did good stuff with these numerals it was in Baghdad a thousand years ago where they invented algebra and there was advances in mathematics agriculture engineering meant all of these fees all at a time when Europe was disemboweling heretics so something changed 12th century this gentleman came around al Ghazali a Muslim scholar learned at this point Islam is maybe just a few hundred years old people are reading the Quran and interpreting and however they sort of want to and feel like it there's not a coherence to the practice of Islam until he comes around and codifies the behavior of a good Muslim in much the same way st. Augustine in his book cities of God codified what it is to be a good Christian how do you burn the witches there's a recipe for that you got it they got to be upside down so the blood does you know there's a whole whole itinerary for how to be a good Muslim and in in his writings contain the assertion that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil two actions that you see in nature are the will of Allah well if you drop a stone and it falls now all I will that if that's your explanation your curiosity stops you combine everything happening in nature being the will of Allah - the manipulation of numbers being the work of the devil and the entire enterprise of that golden era collapses now historians when they look at that error they say well the Mongols came and they you know so historians think of the world in terms of wars and kings they think less about it philosophically about intellectual movements or the absence thereof Islam rose again after this period didn't have science associated with it no new inventions in math you look at the period of Islam in Spain the period where the great alambre was built there is no attendant science going on there it's done it's gone and it is a it is a cost that exists to this there is 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today who are not participants on the frontier of scientific discovery what's the best measure they say just check out the Nobel Prizes I tally them ok how many Jews have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences here they go 25% of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences are won by Jews how many Jews in the world about 15 million tops 15 million how many Muslims in the world 1.3 billion which is huger way huger than 15 million how many Muslims have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences two and a half - is it I can't bring myself to call economics of science I'm sorry I just I just can't I've tried I've really tried I'm sorry that's how many and the physics one was a Pakistani physicist not a middle-eastern physicist so Jews have 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes the 180th of the population of the Muslims has 4,000 times the impact I lose sleep every night wondering how many secrets of the universe lay undiscovered because one-fifth wasn't 1/7 what's a popular leader one-sixth of the population of the world is not a participant on the exploration frontier what thoughts have gone under em tough

Channel: Find Qualia

Views: 303,562

Keywords: islam, science, islam's golden age, islam's golden period, algebra

Id: tJJLvoDg2_E

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020