Physics in medieval Islam

Physics in medieval Islam is the development of physics in the medieval Islamic world in the history of physics. In the course of the expansion of the Islamic world, Muslim scholars encountered the science, mathematics, and medicine of antiquity through the works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, and others. These works and the important commentaries on them were the wellspring of science during the Medieval period. They were translated into Arabic, the lingua franca of this period. Islamic scholarship had inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further, especially placing emphasis on observation and a priori reasoning, formulating crude forms of the scientific method.

Fields of physics studied included optics and magnetism, mechanics (including statics, dynamics, kinematics and motion), and astronomy.

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See also

• Astronomy in medieval Islam
• History of optics
• History of physics
• History of scientific method
• Islamic contributions to Medieval Europe
• Islamic Golden Age
• Science in medieval Islam
• Science in the Middle Ages