ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Physics in medieval Islam

Long, long ago, in a time called the Medieval Period, people in the Islamic world were very interested in learning about the world around them. They wanted to know why things happened the way they did, and how they worked.

One of the things they studied was physics. Physics is the study of how things move and how they interact with each other. They wanted to understand why things fell down when you dropped them, why things stayed standing still, and how things moved.

The people in the Islamic world were very curious and they liked to experiment to see what would happen. They did things like dropping things from tall buildings and measuring how long it took for them to reach the ground. They also built instruments, like telescopes and astrolabes, to help them study the universe.

One famous person who studied physics in medieval Islamic culture was a man named Alhazen. He was very curious about light and how it worked. He did experiments with different kinds of mirrors and lenses to see how they reflected and refracted light. He also wrote a book about optics, which means how light behaves and how we see things.

Another famous person in medieval Islamic physics was a man named Ibn al-Haytham. He was also interested in optics and studied how our eyes work. He did experiments with light and mirrors too, and made important discoveries about how we see things.

Overall, people in the Islamic world were very interested in physics in the Medieval Period. They wanted to learn as much as they could about the world and how it worked. They did experiments and made important discoveries that helped us understand the world even today.