Science and Technology
The Ottomans managed to build a very large collection of libraries. Sultan Mehmet II ordered Georgios Amirutzes, a Greek scholar from Trabzon, to translate and make available to Ottoman educational institutions the geography book of Ptolemy. One of the oldest sources on the history and philosophy of Christianity was also developed for the palace school: the İ'tikad nâme, a work on Christian beliefs by Patriarch Gennadious. Another example is mathematician Ali Qushji from Samarkand, who wrote twelve volumes on mathematics.
Ali Kuşçu (1403–1474) found empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation through his observation on comets and concluded, on the basis of empiricism rather than speculative philosophy, that the moving Earth theory is just as likely to be true as the stationary Earth theory.
Kuşçu also improved on Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī's planetary model and presented an alternative planetary model for Mercury.
Taqi al-Din later built the Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din in 1577, where he carried out astronomical observations until 1580. He calculated the eccentricity of the Sun's orbit and the annual motion of the apogee.
In 1660 the Ottoman scholar Ibrahim Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated Noël Duret's French astronomical work (written in 1637) into Arabic.
Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu was the author of the first surgical atlas and the last major medical encyclopedia from the Islamic world. Though his work was largely based on Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi's Al-Tasrif, Sabuncuoğlu introduced many innovations of his own. Female surgeons were also illustrated for the first time.
An example of a watch which measured time in minutes was created by an Ottoman watchmaker, Meshur Sheyh Dede, in 1702.
Read more about this topic: Ottoman Empire
Famous quotes containing the words science and technology, science and, science and/or technology:
“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Imagination could hardly do without metaphor, for imagination is, literally, the moving around in one’s mind of images, and such images tend commonly to be metaphoric. Creative minds, as we know, are rich in images and metaphors, and this is true in science and art alike. The difference between scientist and artist has little to do with the ways of the creative imagination; everything to do with the manner of demonstration and verification of what has been seen or imagined.”
—Robert A. Nisbet (b. 1913)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)