- Hello, I'm Adam and welcome to Corpse Talk!
The show that brings the dead famous to life.
Tonight's guest is a natural philosopher
who truly changed the way we look at the world.
He's the oracle of optics,
the luminary of luminescence,
and a visionary VIP!
(cheering)
♪ Corpse Talk ♪
♪ A history chat about this or that ♪
♪ Corpse talk ♪
♪ Corpse Talk ♪
♪ Where the dead famous come to life ♪♪
Please welcome Ibn al-Haytham!
- Assalamu alaikum.
Hello, hey! - Welcome.
Now, born in the country we now call Iraq in the year 965,
you were one of the eminent figures of the Islamic Golden Age.
- Please, please, I was but a simple scientist.
I had ideas, ping! I tested them.
And then, I wrote down my findings.
- And can you tell us about some of your scientific research?
- Certainly. I once wrote a book about
whether music made animals behave differently.
- Seriously? Hmm... How did that work?
(Ibn al-Haytham): It was a common belief at that time
that animals had no souls,
but I wanted to know if music could charm the snakes.
And attract the birds.
(♪♪)
- Cool! And what did it do to camels?
Easy boy! Send them to sleep?
(chuckling) Like if I play... this.
- Let's find out, shall we?
(rhythmic music) - Woah!
- According to my experiment, it makes them run.
Very fast!
Isn't science exciting?
(Adam screaming)
- Note to self: don't play music to camels again.
So, you enjoyed testing out your theories,
but one of your earliest ideas nearly got you into hot water.
- Ah, you mean when I was studying the River Nile in Egypt?
The farmers relied on the river's flood water to irrigate their crops.
But I noticed that the river was either flooding too little...
or too much!
- Yes. I see the problem. Help!
- But ten, ping!
I had the brilliant idea to construct a great dam to control the flooding.
And when the Caliph, the ruler of Egypt, heard about it,
he sent me workers to build it.
- Hello, I absolutely cannot wait for my new dam.
- Wow! This was your big break.
- Tell me about it! Except there was one tiny problem.
I soon realized the river was far too big to build a dam across.
My idea was useless, kaput!
- Time for lunch.
(groaning)
- He looks cross. - Let's get out of here!
- Oh, wait for me!
(bell tolls)
(panting)
- The thing about the Caliph is that he had the reputation for executing employees
who didn't deliver what they'd promised.
If I let him down again, I was finished!
(Caliph): Ibn al-Haytham, are you in there?!
- But you're a genius, right?
I bet you came up with a brilliant idea to get out of it.
- Uh... You could say that.
(Caliph): Ibn al-Haytham! - Observe.
Hello, mama!
(trilling)
(playful music)
Happy birthday to me!
- Huh?
- Oh, big yellow eyeballs, yum yum!
- Get well soon, Ibn al-Haytham.
- Wow! That was your big idea?
You pretended of unsound mind and it got you off the hook?
- With one tiny problem...
I had to stay under house arrest until the Caliph died...
(door slams)
10 years later!
(ding!)
- 10 years?! And you didn't even have Wi-Fi!
What did you do?
Juggle fruit? Learn how to bake?
- No! I studied. I conducted experiments.
And I wrote almost 100 important books.
- Yeah, that's probably what I'd do.
- Hypothesis, actions, intermission.
Aha!
- You were only pretending to be sick, right?
- Yes, yes. But I was on the verge of my greatest scientific discovery.
Don't you see?
- See what? - Not what, how!
How do you see?
- How do I see what?
- Precisely. See?
- I don't see... - Yes, you do! See?
- Okay, time out.
How do I put this politely?
Huh?!
- I had just made a breakthrough in our understanding
of how light and vision works. You see?
- Don't start.
- Sorry, let me explain.
Until then, all we knew about light was what the ancient Greeks had told us.
That it shone out from our eyes and that's how we saw things.
- Well, that seems a bit... silly?
- That's what I thought. So I looked for another explanation.
- Uh-oh, he's gone mobile! Cut wide.
- Then it struck me! Say you're an object.
- Oh, here we go. I am an object!
- And say the camera there is an eye. Yeah?
- Oh, yeah. Sure!
- I will be a beam of sunlight.
Here I come!
- Ah!
- I bounce off you and now, I go to the eye!
(static)
- Cut to flashback!
- Pass me a spear. - Uh...
Ooh, mind if I borrow that? - Hey!
- Okay.
Sorry, it's for science.
- Um, that's funny... It looks upside down.
- Let me show you why.
Watch this. Light is beamed in a straight line from the sun.
It hits the tower,
bounces off and travels through the hole in the wall.
Quick!
(groans)
But because the hole is so small,
the image is flipped around upside down.
I wrote all about it in my most important work:
The book of optics.
It's a real page-turner! - Ooh.
- Bonus fact: many years later,
it was discovered that our eyes work the same way.
We actually see the world upside down.
- Uh, we do?
Huh?
(screaming)
- Oh, I should have said,
our brains flip what we see, so everything is the right way up.
(screaming)
- Eye-opening stuff!
Ibn al-Haytham, groundbreaking scholar,
inspirational scientist and provider of catchy tunes for camels,
thank you!
- Masalama!
- Join me next time on Corpse Talk,
the show that brings the dead famous to life!
Think I'll just have a little rest.
(cheering)
♪ Corpse Talk ♪
♪ A history chat about this or that ♪
♪ Corpse talk ♪
♪ Corpse Talk ♪
♪ Where the dead famous come to life ♪♪