The Man Who Caught the Rainbow : The Forgotten Story of the Persian Mathematician Who Solved One of Nature's Greatest Mysteries
Language: English
Published by Independently Published Mai 2026, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: AHA-BUCH GmbH, Einbeck, GermanyAHA-BUCH GmbH
AbeBooks seller since August 14, 2006
Condition: New
£ 27.85
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Neuware - The quiet years are the ones that matter. In a darkened room in medieval Persia, a mathematician placed a glass sphere in a beam of sunlight - and solved one of nature's most beautiful mysteries. Then the world forgot him for seven hundred years. His name was Kamal al-Din al-Farisi. His achievement was the first correct explanation of the rainbow: a complete geometric and experimental account of why those colors appear in that order, at that angle, in every sky over every country that has ever seen rain. He worked it out in the late thirteenth century in Tabriz, using a method of painstaking mathematical analysis and experiment that would not be called 'the scientific method' until centuries later - because his work was never translated, and European science never knew it existed. The Man Who Caught the Rainbow tells the story of al-Farisi's life, his work, and the extraordinary question he refused to leave unanswered. It is the story of a man who spent years in a darkened room with a glass sphere and a beam of light, building toward an understanding that would outlast the empire he lived under, the language he wrote in, and the tradition that preserved his name. It is also a story about something larger: what it means to do work the world does not see. To ask one question seriously enough that it becomes a life. To discover something true, write it down carefully, and trust that the truth will outlast the silence.>Follow a scientific detective story across seven centuries: the discovery, the forgetting, and the modern recovery of al-Farisi's achievement Explore the vibrant intellectual world of thirteenth-century Tabriz - one of the medieval world's most cosmopolitan cities - and the Ilkhanate patronage network that made al-Farisi's work possible Understand the physics of the rainbow in the most human and accessible terms ever written - no equations, only clarity Find in al-Farisi's story a quiet answer to the question we all ask: do the years we pour into something that goes unnoticed actually matter They do. The Man Who Caught the Rainbow is the evidence. The rainbow is still there, every time it rains. So is he.…
Seller Inventory # 9798195573577
- Title
- The Man Who Caught the Rainbow : The Forgotten Story of the Persian Mathematician Who Solved One of Nature's Greatest Mysteries
- Author
- Narin Hikma
- Publisher
- Independently Published Mai 2026
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- Neu
- Binding
- Taschenbuch
- Language
- English
- ISBN 13
- 9798195573577
- Item weight
- 364 grams
- Dimensions
- 229x152x14 mm
For fifteen hundred years, nobody could explain the rainbow.
You have seen a hundred of them. You have probably never been told why the colours come in that order, or why the arc always sits at the same height in the sky, or why there is sometimes a second, fainter bow above the first with its colours running backwards. Almost nobody has. The most public mystery in the natural world hangs over every field after every storm, and most of us have quietly agreed not to ask.
Aristotle asked, and got it wrong. Ibn Sina asked, and got it wrong. In thirteenth-century England, two of the finest minds in Christendom asked, and got it wrong.
Then, in a darkened room in the Persian city of Tabriz, around the year 1309, a mathematician named Kamal al-Din al-Farisi covered his window, left a single slot for the sun, and set a glass sphere full of water in the beam. He had built a raindrop he could hold still. Over years of patient work he traced what the light did inside it — and worked out, correctly and completely, why the sky makes rainbows.
Then history lost him for six hundred years.
This is a narrative biography of that man and that room, written for readers who have never opened a physics book. It is the story of a brilliant, cosmopolitan, dangerous world — Mongol khans, a vizier executed at eighty, a city of silk and scholars — and of one person inside it who gave his life to a single question nobody was paying him to ask.
- Understand exactly how a rainbow works, in plain language, with no mathematics required
- Meet the forgotten Persian scholar whose answer arrived more than three centuries before Descartes and nearly four before Newton
- Watch a manuscript survive seven hundred years of war, damp and indifference to surface at auction in London in 2018
- Discover why a Dominican friar in Germany reached the identical answer in the same decade, and what that proves about how truth travels
- Sit with the quiet, difficult question underneath it all: does careful work still count when no one is watching you do it
This is a book for anyone who has ever poured years into something the world never noticed.
The empire that funded him is gone. The city was sacked. The angle he measured has not moved.
Open the first page. He has been waiting a long time.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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