2. HOLDING SACRED THAT WHICH IS NOT SACRED

2. Holding Sacred that which is not Sacred ~ 88 ~ barred the way to such activity. Jabir ibn Hayyan (d. 817), however, understanding the importance of observation, used findings based thereon in his scientific studies, the written accounts of which were transmitted to Europe in translations. Thinking went on developing along these lines until it formed the basis for experimental science as it is known today. The first person in history to advance the theory of inertia in material bodies was Ali Hasan ibn alHaysam (d. 1021). This discovery reached Europe, where scholars subjected it to further scrutiny. It was formulated much later, as Newton’s law of motion, namely, that every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled by external forces to change that state. Then again it was ibn Haysam who originally discovered that the path taken by a ray of light or other wave motion in traversing the distance between any two points is such that the time taken is a minimum. This discovery later became known as Fermat’s principle of least time.