to do the right thing we are now acting to stop them from having the ability to continue doing the wrong from bangladesh's prime minister sheikh hasina says she'll help arrange a muslims who fled violence in me and mob she will survive not to tolerate any injustices against them more than three hundred thousand people have escaped the recent violence which erupted in rakhine states two weeks ago. recent airstrikes by the saudi led coalition in yemen are illegal and have killed large numbers of children according to human rights watch it says twenty six children are among thirty nine civilians killed in five airstrikes since june they died when four family homes in the shop were hit. demonstrators are gathering in paris to protest against president michael's plans to reform french labor laws is being called a day of action one of the main reforms would make it easier for medium and small businesses to sack stuff you can piece of given their first approval to a bill that would be of ministers the power to bypass parliament and create laws.

in the run up to brics that those are your top stories of life and. between the eighth and fourteenth centuries there was a golden age of science when scholars from the islamic world introduced the rigorous experimental approach that laid the foundations of the modern scientific method they transformed the superstition of alchemy into the science of chemistry the chemical industry has of course reshaped the modern world giving us new fuel drugs and new materials but the methodology and principles of chemistry go back over a thousand years. and jamaal kili and i've been researching the contributions of the scientists of the golden age i'll be tracing back the roots of modern chemistry

to the scholars of the earliest slam it world. this is doha the capital of qatar two decades ago none of this existed all this development has only been possible because of a huge investment of revenue from oil and gas in other words the chemical industry . oil is responsible for much that we take for granted in daily life from fuel to

plastics to medicines even the thomas road i'm driving on the chemical plants over there. is processing the gas and crude oil that exists in such abundance in the middle east. with oil in its raw state it is a mixture of many different chemicals and these are separated out through a process called fractional distillation. the crude oil is heated until it becomes a vapor the vapor rises up the distillation tower and separates into is different components as it cleans the fractionating tower in a modern oil refinery is a high tech version of a piece of apparatus called an eleven pick used by the golden age scientists as a distillation tool over a thousand years ago. one early pioneer of distillation was the ninth century physician and chemist arathi amongst his many writings are the earliest

known accounts of using distillation to produce substances like kerosene sulfuric acid and pure alcohol this wasn't for drinking but the use as a medical disinfectant. hair in istanbul pizza star studies the work of the scholars of the gold. has brought with him. still to show me how the early chemists used it for distillation . this one is made of copper. and there were others made of of glass or a world glossy yes yes the important thing about a still is that there's a hot and cold and so the hot and is where the steam is produced it condenses. and is received into the receiver here. what we would need would be water. first of

all usually distilled water you could use rainwater the whole day then. and then we'll need whatever we're going to distill for example if you want perfect roses would be excellent rose petals up i'm sure the restaurant was mind blowing if not so the water with the rose petals will be heated up here as the steam is given off it takes the scent of the roses it reaches the eleven bit where it condenses back to a liquid and drips down here into this other container who are the people who are carrying out these things the chemistry i think there are two main names which stand out above all the others above all. but also other drowsy. but hey on a particular it's very early on in the golden age and he's regarded by many as the first scientist of the golden age and the thing was he doing many of his chemical procedures are those which may still be used today. for example. or precipitation

distillation job about how young was a polymath who grew up in modern day iraq and vast work covers medicine and music chemistry and much more there were thousands of manuscripts attributed to far more than a single man could actually have written it's believed that many latest dollars wrote under his name because he was held in such high regard whatever the truth he is credited with applying an experimental based approach to chemistry. the scholars of the golden age began applying the scientific method to chemistry by which i mean they were conducting experiments in a way that was a big leap from the pure philosophical thinking of the ancient greeks but to conduct careful experiments they needed apparatus much of which hadn't even been

invented at the time and for chemistry in particular they need to hone their skills at glass blowing and glass making and so i'm going to meet a man who's going to show me just how difficult easy it is to actually carry out that skill. so i. set. the smiley. to stammer lee. there are some. we can sure sure to have. time to fix. our form of government but it has the i mean. this is just.

one. long. long. after city are the number think nothing. of. the. other month although. if john high and was making l.m. bit back in late eighth century he certainly would have been doing it this way the sort of blast they would have used one thousand years ago would have been very different though to put this and in the lead in all the other ingredients into these auburn's and just cook them and bake them until they melted so although they did have glass blowing to shake the molten glass they didn't have something with such high temperature like this jet of gas here.

should claim. well that's pretty remarkable my own lembit. although job i'm high on and those like him performing experiments and perfecting apparatus the work they were doing was very much a mixture of chemistry and alchemy indeed the arabic word for chemistry is. from. which the word alchemy is derived but whereas modern chemistry is a rigorous exact science alchemy is associated with superstition a magic the alchemy main goal was to turn other metals into gold to his followers job or even higher yarn was known as. the mystic because they believed his work was no different from sorcery even today some chemistry can seem like magic of thrones

or chemistry student and she's going to help me with some demonstration that i guess could be used as part of a magic show i'm going to turn these colorless liquids black simply with the power of my mind. right think it. to me. first of all. the life. we go. is not hot so this is a chemical reaction is giving off light but no heat and for our final trick. yeah.

of course for all these reactions we know that there's a chemical explanation for what's going on but what we call chemistry has its roots in the alchemy of the golden age. so. to what extent was there a real flaw in being down in amongst all this myth mysticism and alchemy. jim i don't see a contradiction between science and alchemy. rather i see a synergy with the one feeds on the other quite often and that you could say about every period great period of scientific breakthroughs you said of the great. parts of lots of middle ages you could say. that newton was was involved in alchemy.

the early alchemy school of cesspits turning common less valuable metals into precious gold job of an eye on a particular was obsessed with trying to dissolve metals and that led him to research all different kinds of acids but gold is notoriously difficult to design so i'm going to buy a small amount of it and see if it's possible. that it can lead him in the head. and nothing. and then there's another. dozen or so we have. to live the head. of well. the next you know sentiment. and i'm loving this but you didn't have a complaint and you haven't come forward i'll admit i'm going to last when. you

go in. and look at the head ok. and i think it was. shallow and shallow at this hour. me through my experiments to dissolve is professor hell stuff about. what the hell i need your chemistry expertise here i've got this gold coin and i wonder is it possible to dissolve gold berry very difficult i don't like all noble metals is relatively unreactive but the act of towards acids is only one acids that can really do the job which is this one. which means kingly water and it's water because it's the only thing which is old skulled it's believed that job and first distilled it and it's a mixture actually of two s's nitric acid and hard to chloroplast yes and it's exceptionally

corrosive and exceptionally react it sounds nasty it's very very nasty it's vicious so can you demonstrate it for me let's see if it works so we're going to pour into the baker i'm going to save your beautiful gold coin since you travel so far with it and use this rather more expendable piece of zinc. so you can see it bubbling away probably wouldn't react as fast as i said it would dissolve away. and why would people want to do this why would they want to dissolve metals like go because you can purify it or you can refine your gold by dissolving it and then read precipitating. the metal out you know there was still the fumes are still coming up i think that lump of zinc has been dissolved entirely in the liquid. we did leave a small piece of gold in aqua region although this takes a lot longer to react but over an hour the gold gradually dissolves.

neither of those acid on their own will dissolve gold but taken together they produce the right ions to do exactly that. chemistry wasn't about alchemy there was a practical side to it as well and many developments in chemistry were driven by islam. cleanliness was a religious requirement in islam for example the washing of the hands face and feet before prayer and this requirement for cleanliness quickly led to the development of whole industry for example the development the so the first bullet falls or so were found and manufactured in the islamic world.

wrote about the difference between. and the word alkali derives from the arabic. which means the actions of. referring to the original source of substances and of course alkalis are used to make. a hazmat runs a small business in jordan. age old chemical processes to manufacture so. that a nice thank you. ok. makes mixing olive oil with an alkaline and then adding. spices.

this chemical process is called. after cooling. and then left to dry for two. months or herb yeah. this is. good. for the here not for me too late. during the golden age making was commercialized and the process started to be developed on an industrial scale today a bar of soap that remakes in two weeks can be produced in an industrial soap factory in just a few hours. this said factories in the united kingdom and jamie benton is in

charge of the plant. was principally been made in the same way for centuries a mixture of oil and alkaline we've been making so here for one hundred fifty years and one of our king gradients is in this big tank that's one hundred tons of caustic soda to react with the oil. on this site they produce about thirty tonnes of soap per day around a hundred thousand tons of industrialize soap making on this grand scale needs chemistry on a grand scale too and the critical factor is controlling the chemical reaction mixing carefully measured quantities in temperature controlled reactors so in this reactor we've got. we're adding coconut oil which is the part of the so that actually creates the after that we're adding caustic soda.

the mixture is constantly monitored as it reacts and about an hour later the reaction is complete as with remus process once it's reacted the next stage is to draw out the soak. in here is a back you spray dryer so the so that's really here we can crater back you can suck the water out of the so. backs of dried so pellets are sent from the factory all over the world where they are perfect and shaped into bars of so. has been made in basically the same way for centuries but modern technology like vacuum spray dryers and precisely controlled reactors have sped up the process. chemistry relies on being able to weigh and measure accurately and that's something we can trace back to the golden age. one of the reasons we regard the scholars of

the golden age as the first true sciences is their obsession with accuracy is the reason why we think of job. as the first true chemists and here's an example of why this beautiful set. scales it was built by a scholar by the name of a higher than the in the twelfth century it's called me. and is said to be accurate to one part in sixty thousand if you look very carefully along the army can see very precise graduations giving us the distance from the center and as the cups are hanging from different lengths it's basically the principle of moments as they move out they will pull it down the balance is achieved when the diamond shape in the middle is exactly vertical it's very very precise but apart from that it's actually a beautiful work of art as well.

in measurement allowed early chemists like java have been hired to be more rigorous in their experiments and their approach to all aspects of chemistry and this included the way he looked at materials grouping and categorizing them categorizing substances enables us to navigate our way around the scientific world just like in this bizarre over here i find. over here like this and after the lights text. and over here ceramics. one job i've been high on did that was different was categorized substances not according to arbitrate factors but according to the way they behaved in experiment this was a huge change in what had come before. back in the lab i wanted to find

out what hell as a modern chemist thought of jobbers early attempts at categorising and i want to show you this extracts from a manuscript of his so this is translated from arabic into latin into english it says here among all bodies of whatsoever kind we find soul which is gold. to be burned by sulfur to lease reacted with sulfur to the next to this least burned is jupiter which is there lou no which is silver and he goes on and he ends with and mars which is ion by reason of the only agony of sulphur is most easily burned it's all very obscure in fact the word jibberish actually comes from jobbers namely that it if you write something to obscurely is jibberish it's like job but what he has here seems to me the beginnings of the reactivity series of metals listing them in order of how easily they react with sulfur yes how correct was this well there was a couple little inaccuracies in it but he was way ahead of his time because showing

reactivity herself is often quite difficult so what i thought we'd do is we're going to compare and contrast of the activities of certain metals with water iron for example which he mentions we all know the i and russ so it's a slow reaction but we're going to compare and contrast a triumvirate of metals and see how fast they react and they are potassium sodium and copper. i thought we'd start with the most reactive this is potassium and it's very soft and malleable and you can easily cut it with a knife so three to one. and all larry and present lie look flame. and popping around because it isn't hydrogen or. we're going to move on to our next metal sodium sodium chloride is common source but sodium has got very very different properties it's again a metal you can cut with a knife three to one in this buzzing around and then pretty it's going to melt

because of the heat of the reaction. in a bottle so it's lasting longer in the water not reacting so quickly. and by way of comparison just eliminate all the variables this is copper and if we don't need that now we don't need this because couples do absolutely nothing it's very unreal active and that's why the coins in your pocket don't catch fire if you put in the washing machine working to get them wet and so this order of just how reactive metals are i mean by modern standards of chemistry job or. didn't get it quite right he had metals in the wrong order in that series but how impressive was that given that we're talking you know over a thousand years ago it's exception impressive because he didn't know what he was looking for he didn't know what to expect we know these things because we look at the periodic table so you would call that chemistry not alchemy i think it's

definitely chemistry. job of a hay and was starting to apply the scientific method deriving his conclusions from experiments and later chemists like al-kindi and razi also basing their work on careful experiments and observations and the way we do chemistry today organizing and altering the elements and looking for trends. in their properties just like the reactivity series. first started to do. next time we travel to some of the most cutting edge medical facilities in the middle east today they wanted to know him and you know with one in ten now we can think one of the human genome within six to ten day. we look back. from the golden age challenge to accepted ideas to explain the human hall this is the poem that is circulation is through the scope and it's now obvious what it was and them.

and see how texts from the islamic world were so influential in medical science across the globe a century this science done to be a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. business update brought to you by. going places together.

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