Speaker
Prof.
Hossein Masoumi Hamedani
(Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Iran)
Description
In a treatise entitled On the Light of the Moon, the physicist and mathematician of the 10th-11th centuries Ibn al-Haytham proves that the Moon is not a polished body and that it does not reflect the light it receives from the Sun in the way a convex mirror does. Almost six centuries later, Galileo takes up the same problem in his famous Dialogues Concerning the Two Great World System. By a method which is somewhat different from that of Ibn al-Haytham, he arrives at a similar conclusion.
The aim of this article is to discuss the similarities and the differences of the two methods and the conclusions their authors draw from them.
