Revision 5.15 “What the West Owes the East” (Navigation, Optics, Chemistry, Astronomy, and Calendrics)

    Few readers are surprised, probably, to learn that the name Sahara is Arabic (it means “deserts”), but the extent of our debt to the Arabs in the field of navigation and geography is shown by such Arabic terms as nadir, zenith, and azimuth, which still form an important part of those disciplines in […]