In continuing this tradition in the early eleventh century CE, the Arab Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) wrote an impressive experimental treatise on optics in which he related in a mathematically demanding way the physics and geometry of light to the anatomy of the eye. Al-Haytham's work was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century and decisively influenced later optical research for a long time. Because of this and similar developments, Crombie saw experimental science of the modern world created by thirteenth-century philosophers of the West transforming Greek geometrical method and uniting it with the experimental habit of the practical arts.
All these different attempts of probing nature through experimental trials certainly contributed to the final emergence of experimentation in the seventeenth century as a self-conscious, methodically controlled and systematically used form of scientific experience. Galileo's new conception of motion, which was based on experiment and measurement from about 1604 on, played an instrumental and decisive role in this (Schmitt 1969). In the second half of the century, scientific academies devoted themselves to the new science and became the primary centers of experimental activity.
From the seventeenth century on, experimentation increasingly meant the implementation of new or improved scientific instruments. Following a suggestion of Thomas S.
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