Power’s Answers to a question
What is the greatest idea of the last 1,000 years ? (Written for New York Times series for the millennium)
It lies beyond all reasonable doubt that no single idea has had a more profound or ubiquitous impact on what the human race has become, or what it has worked upon the face of the planet, than the vesting of authority in experiment.
…. set in motion by a man named Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, born around the year 965 in Basra, in what is now Iraq