{"id":368,"date":"2009-01-29T21:06:19","date_gmt":"2009-01-29T21:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2009\/01\/29\/you_can_call_him_al_again\/"},"modified":"2011-03-19T11:24:53","modified_gmt":"2011-03-19T11:24:53","slug":"you_can_call_him_al_again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2009\/01\/29\/you_can_call_him_al_again\/","title":{"rendered":"You can call him Al. Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s over. And over a week ago at that. But I only finally caught up with the third and last episode of Prof Jim Al-Khalili\u2019s BBC4 series Science and Islam<\/em> last night.<\/p>\n

\tI flagged it up<\/a> just before the series started and had been quite excited, having enjoyed Atom<\/a>, Al-Khalili\u2019s earlier documentary about the hey-day of physics in the early 20th century. It didn\u2019t quite<\/em> deliver at the outset, although things improved with each episode. The final program was easily the best of the bunch and unearthed some telling detail about the influence of Arabic\/Islamic astronomy on Copernicus.<\/p>\n

\tOverall I think it was a worthy effort, though you really can’t get through much material in three hours of telly. I\u2019m tempted by the book<\/a> (actually written by someone else \u2013 Eshan Masood), since it is an important period in history, especially given the current<\/em> parlous state of relations between the west and the middle east. You can hear<\/em> more about the Abbasid Caliphs who started of the Islamic Empire on In Our Time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\tI would go on but there\u2019s a more considered review of the series on Andreas Forster\u2019s blog<\/a>. Andreas is a postdoc at Imperial who tells me he is \u201cthinking about\u201d getting started on Nature Network. So how about heading over there to read his piece, leave a comment and encourage him with some of that world-famous NN lovin\u2019?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s over. And over a week ago at that. But I only finally caught up with the third and last episode of Prof Jim Al-Khalili\u2019s BBC4 series Science and Islam last night. I flagged it up just before the series … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}