MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 211Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, for example, overturned the Aris-
totelian method of inquiry and elaborated the scientific method in its
stead. They and others also helped establish the mechanistic model of the
universe, which held that every physical event had a purely physical cause.
Galileo, Descartes, and others went on to dismantle the Aristotelian idea
that everything is made earth, air, water, and fire, replacing it with the
atomic theory of matter, which laid the basis for modern chemistry.
Andreas Vesalius mapped the anatomy of the human body for the first
time, and William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood. Together,
they and others laid the basis for modern medicine. Antonie Van
Leeuwenhoek discovered the world of microorganisms, which eventually
led to Pasteur's powerful germ theory of disease.
Robert Boyle began the process that led to formulating the four laws
of thermodynamics, just four laws that govern the transformation of en-
ergy into work in any system from a rabbit's digestive tract to the birth of
the universe.
And let us not forget to mention the greatest scientist of them all, Isaac
Newton, who invented differential calculus, explained the motion of all
objects in the universe from pebbles to planets with three simple formulas,
and discovered the laws of gravitation, thereby definitively explaining the
motion of all heavenly bodies, the work begun by Copernicus and Galileo.
Just for a capper, he described the particle nature of light and discovered
the spectrum. No scientist had ever done so much and none has equaled
his achievements since. It's ironic, therefore, that he himself felt his proud-
est accomplishment was remaining celibate all his life.
But here's the really interesting mystery to think about. Muslim scien-
tists had come right to the threshold of virtually all these discoveries long
before the West arrived there. In the tenth century, for example, al-Razi re-
futed Galen's theory of four humors as a basis for medical treatment. In the
eleventh century, Ibn Sina analyzed motion mathematically, as Newton
was to do so fruitfully six centuries later. In the thirteenth century, about
three hundred years before Vesalius, Ibn al-Nafis described how blood cir-
culated in the body. Ibn al-Haytham, who died in 1039, discovered the
spectrum, described the scientific method, and established quantification
and experiment as the basis for scientific exploration: he pretty much pre-
Newtoned Newton and pre-Descarted Descartes. Muslims had already