People who solve real problems with science

This lesson asks you to describe how science and technology are used in occupations, including skilled trades, to solve real problems, and to analyse what various communities have contributed to science and technology. The museum offers only two examples from the medieval Muslim world, an engineer and a scholar of optics; your class must bring occupations and communities from elsewhere, including its own. ¹

The expectations ask for an occupation, the science or technology used in it, and the real problem it addresses. For each person you read about, write down the problem, the tool or idea that was used, and who gained from it.

Al-Jazari was an engineer in the service of the Artuqids at Amid, and he wrote a book of devices commissioned by Nasir al-Din Mahmud ². One of its six divisions is for water-raising machines ². Ibn al-Haytham went to Egypt and tried to regulate the flow of the Nile. He gave up the task when he realised it was impossible ³. Afterwards he earned his living in Cairo by copying scientific manuscripts ³.

Ibn al-Haytham gave up the Nile task when he realised it could not be done. Is giving up on a problem that cannot be solved a failure in science, or part of doing science well, and why?

• Al-Jazari: the engineer, his patron and the six divisions of his book.
• Ibn al-Haytham: the scholar of optics, his Nile task and his work as a copyist.
• Ibn al-Haytham's dark room: one of his experiments with light, set out step by step.

Read about Al-Jazari and Ibn al-Haytham. For each, write one sentence naming the problem they worked on and one naming what they made or wrote.