on al-jazeera after signs in the golden age state you can see watching by foot. a deadly attack destroyed her family and left her badly wounded. a long time to california and little girl's journey through. time progress she became our family. that would touch the hearts of the people around her ever was excited when i saw the situation. on al-jazeera wild at this time between the eighth and fourteenth centuries there was a golden age of science when scholars from the fly mc 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 we shake 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 jamal clearly 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 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 . and. the oil is was all the more for much that we take for granted daily life from fuel to plastics the medicines even the tama 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. oil in its war state 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 his different components as it cools 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 or ozzie 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. here in istanbul to pisa star studies the work of the scholars of the golden egg has brought with him and olympic 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 very well glass and yes yes the important thing about

a still is that there's a hot and and there's a cold and so the whole turned is where the steam is produced then 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. flu 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 and so the water with the rose petals will be heated up here as the steam is given off it takes the center of the rose as it reaches the eleven bit where it condenses back to 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 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 believed that many later scholars wrote under his name because he was held in such high regard whatever the truth he's 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 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 or easy it is to actually carry out that skill. so i. said. it's him her. to stammer lee. there are some next fall. we can sure secure her.

ok. time to fix a our form of government but it has the i mean. this is just. one . in the long run. along the left as are a number. of. the. other month although. if job one high i was making a limbic back in may 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 unleaded 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 go. well that's pretty remarkable my own lembit. although job i'm high on and those like him performing experiments and perfecting operating 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 those 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. of a. need to make. 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 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 mysticism and alchemy. jim i don't see a contradiction between science and alchemy. rather i see a synergy 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 excess with 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 he can have. nothing. and then there's another. dozen or so we have. to live the head. of the next you know sentiment. that.

you didn't. ever complain about and you haven't. lost and. you know it. and live it. ok to be. discovered. and i think it was. shallow and shallow. 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 active towards acids there's only one acids the can really do the job which is this one. which means kingly

water and it's called can you water because it's the only thing that is old skulled believe 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 to 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 off it goes you can see it bubbling away probably wouldn't react as fast as a set 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. 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 us is on our own will dissolve gold but taken together they produce the right ions to do exactly that. but chemistry wasn't only about alchemy there was a practical side to it as well and many developments in chemistry was 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 solid 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 in so making. a hazmat runs a small making 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. after cooling. and then let it dry for two. months or herb yeah. this is this is but it is a good. and. 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 factories in the united kingdom and jamie benton is in charge of the plant. is 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 great years 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 tonnes of industrialize soap making on this grand scale needs chemistry on a grand scale. 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 a coconut oil which is the part of the soap 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 vacuum spray dryer so the so that. we can create a vacuum and suck the water out of the so. bags of dried so pellets are sent from the factory all over the world where they're 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 sets. scales it was built by a scholar by the name of a higher than 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 of an ion 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 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 all the agony of sulphur is most easily burned it's all very obscure in fact the word jibberish actually comes from jobbers knowing that if you write something too obscurely it's 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 do is we're going to compare and contrast of the activities of certain metals with water ion for example which he mentions we all know the i and russ so that'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 zero larry and freddy lie look flame. and popping around because.

we're going to move on to our next metal sodium sodium chloride is common source that sodium has got very very different properties it's again a metal you can cut with a knife three to one in against this buzzing around and then pretty it's going to melt because of the heat of the reaction. here it is hissing away yes i was in a bottle last 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 jobber been hay on 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. jobber been high on was starting to apply the scientific method deriving his conclusions from experiments later chemists like kindi and razi also basing their work on careful experiments and observations and the way we do chemistry today organizing and ordering the elements and looking for trends in their properties well just like the reactivity series that's what job or first started to do. next time we travel to some of the most cutting edge medical facilities in the middle east today that original human genome was six points in ten years and now we can sequence the human genome within six to ten day. we

look back at how one scholar from the golden age challenge to accepted ideas to explain the human heart this is the primary circulation that is the scope of it's now obvious but it was. and see how texts from the islamic world was so influential in medical science across the globe for centuries science tend to be a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. in the next episode of science in a golden age more in the contributions made by scholars join the medieval islamic period in the field of medicine. science tend to be a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. to such like a magical the more i learn about the more i respect science in

a golden age with professor jim miller at this time. this is quiet the signal is given. out yet so it's safe to walk to school last year there are more than thirty. it is in this community in one month the police say this area is a raid zone one of several in some townships and children sometimes get caught in the crossfire when rival gangs fight so parents and grandparents have started what they call a walking bust to try to take the violence i lost my son. go i also lost my but there are more than one hundred fifty volunteers working for several walking buses teachers say it is working class attendance has improved the volunteers also act as security guards the philippines is asia's largest catholic nation priests are treated like gods but the church has a dark secret i want to investigate sexual misconduct inside the most powerful

institution in the philippines at this time on al-jazeera. and for you. and i'm daryn jordan in doha with a quick reminder of the top stories here on al-jazeera north korea has fired another missile over japan the u.s. military said it was an intermediate range ballistic missile three thousand seven hundred kilometers well that range is long enough to reach the u.s. military base on this missile was further to the north less a second north korean missile to for.