mr benjamin netanyahu to halt a key transfer of kathy funds intended to pay civil servants in gaza brazil's new president jalal son at all says he will strive to preserve the environment while pursuing economic development that's this fight relaxing protection of indigenous lands in the amazon rain forest also now was making a special address to the world economic forum in the swiss town of the apples british and french police have suspended the search for a light aircraft carrying premier league footballer emiliano salah that went missing over the english channel the twenty eight year old argentinian had just signed for cardiff city from french team nohant he was one of two people on board that plane. well those are the headlines that stay with us for science in that golden age thanks for watching a season that i. in afghanistan billions of dollars of international aid have been donated to girls' education but where has the money gone when east meets girls

desperate to learn and asks why is the system failing them. 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 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 slammin quo.

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 daily life from fuel. to plastics the medicines even the tarmac 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 raw 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 towers and separates interest 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 a scientist 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 for use as

a medical disinfectant. here in istanbul dr peter star studies the work of the scholars of the golden age has brought with him and 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 whole turned is where the steam is produced it's been condenses. and is received into the receiver here. what we would need would be water. first of all usually distilled water you could use rain water 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 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 rose as 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 jabbering higher. but also other drowsy. jobber but high on a particular is very early on in the golden age and he is regarded by many as the first scientists the golden age and also think is he doing many of his chemical procedures are those which may still be used today. for example motion or precipitation distillation job about how young was a polymath who grew up in modern day iraq and vast work covers medicine in 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 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 there 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 or easy it is to actually carry out

that skill. so i. was. really. him be a really kind of the star miley. of all. there are some looks for. time to fix they haven't even been a awful. lot of this is. in the long run. left as. a number.

of them up although. if one was making it back in late eighth century he certainly would have been doing it this way the sort of gloss they would have used one thousand years ago would have been very different they would've put this lead in all the other ingredients into these auburn's and just cooked them a 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 jets of gas here. should clinch. that's pretty remarkable my own

a little bit. although job 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 l. kenia from which the word alchemy is derived but where is modern chemistry is a rigorous exact science alchemy is associated with super. a magic the main goal was to turn other metals into gold to his followers job was known as. the mystic because they believed his work was no different from sorcery even today some chemistry can seem like magic. or chemistry and she's going to help me with some demonstrations that i guess could be used as part of a magic show i'm going to. simply with the power of my.

rights think. i need to make. sure we go. it's not hot so this is a chemical reaction it's giving off light but no heat and for our final trick. yeah . of course 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 their real flaw and it's being done in amongst all this mr 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 greeks but surgically lots of lots of middle ages you could. leave it as it newton was was involved in alchemy that's my sigs on the real thing. the early alchemy school excess were turning common less valuable metals into precious gold job out of an eye on a particular was obsessed with trying to dissolve metals and that led him to research all different kinds of suits but gold is notoriously difficult to dissolve

so i'm going to buy a small amount of it and see if it's possible. i just didn't make them at that. job but then nothing they can. and then there's a another political enemy earliest the dozen or so we have. to live the head. of more than just have the next you know sentiment. that. an am i've been missed but it has been whatever compay again you have been there handcuff you what island in the last one for far. keep going. and live in the hope to ok. so we discover lend. a hand i figure i shall look at that it is yellow and so

bizarre let. me through my experiment to dissolve is professor hell sauce 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 assets that can really do the job which is this one. which means kingly water and it's called can be water because it's the only thing which is also called believe that job or high on first distilled it and it's a mixture actually of two s's nitric acid and hard to claw recasts 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 on the save your piece focal point since you've

traveled so far with it and used this rather more expendable piece of zinc. so off it goes 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. find your cold by dissolving and then read proceed citing that the meth labs 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 us as on their own will dissolve gold but taken together they produce the right ions today exactly.

but early 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 of so the first solid falls of so were found and manufactured in the islamic world.

jobber but how yon wrote about the difference between acids and alkalies and the word derives from the arabic which means the ashes of salt referring to the original source of substances and of course alkaloids are used in soap making. rima has meant runs a small soap making business in jordan where she uses age old chemical processes to manufacture so these are all working. together nice thank you. ok remember make soap by mixing olive oil with an alkaline and then adding her own herbs and spices. this chemical process is called support a fixation. after cooling the soap is cut into bars and then left to draw it for two weeks. this.

is a herb yeah bailey's yaz this is believes this is but is it good for the skin and. for the here not for me too late. during the golden age soak 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 its in the united kingdom and jamie benton is in charge of the plants. principally been made in the same way for centuries a mixture of oil and alkali we've been making soap 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 the alkali to react with the oil. on this site they produce about thirty tonnes of soap per day around a hundred thousand tonnes a year 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 palm kernel oil which is already we're adding the 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 the grimace 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 create a vacuum and 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 soap soap has been made in basically the same way for centuries but modern technology like vacuum spray draw isn't precisely controlled reactors have sped up the process. modern 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 and draw as the 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 in the past century it's called me zonal hekmat 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 cops 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. accurate weighing in measurement allowed early chemists like job and 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 carpets. over here lights and after the lights textiles 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 experiments 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 categorizing acts 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 not. 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 iron by reason of the only ad geneive sulphur is most easily burned it's all very obscure in fact the word jibberish actually comes from jobbers namely that if you write something to 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 was sulphur 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 on for example which he mentions we all know the i and ross 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 very impressive lie looks big for me and popping around because. we're going to move on to our next method sodium sodium chloride is a common source that sodium has got very very different properties it's again a metal you can cut with a knife three to one and it's buzzing around and then pretty it's going to melt because of the heat of the reaction. in here it is hissing away yet this is not a in a bottle so it's lasting longer in the water not reacting so quickly. and by way

after paris and 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 why the koreans in your pockets don't catch fire if you put in the washing machine washing machine get them wet and so this order of just how reactive metals are i mean by modern standards of chemistry job. 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 each 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 on 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 well just like the reactivity series that's what job are first started to do. next time we travel to some of the most cutting edge medical facilities in the middle east today they are not human genome was sequenced in ten years and now we can sequence the human genome within six to ten days. we look back at how one scholar from the golden age challenge to accepted ideas to explain the human heart this is the poem that the circulation is through the scope of it's now obvious photos of them. and see how texts from the islam was so influential in medical science across the globe for centuries. to be

a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. the battle over the minimum wage heated up across the country today thousands of fast food workers walked off the job desperate for a better wage use if you cured your average worker a little more money they're probably going to be able to pay bills maybe to spend a little bit more i'm going to be right down to fifty k.p.h. . to survive in twenty first century america i'm nervous we cannot afford. a job. on al-jazeera. in an ordinary week to even atar at the heart of the only functioning hospital in town in north east and south sudan and his team operate on around sixty patients the united nations refugee agency nominated him for the prestigious nansen award

which you won in recognition of his work and the incredibly difficult to constance's. south sudan has been in conflict since twenty thing. the war has divided the country along ethnic lines two hundred thousand people most of them refugees from sudan spilling out state even this remote town and looked about back hospital for all their medical needs they would has destroyed almost the infrastructure which. almost all way including my hospital was obstruct the process of you know visions of the mother to walk into the city that their supposed. rewind returns i can bring your people back to life i'm sorry with brand new updates on the best of al-jazeera documentaries in libya i was the global for us and like any other student rewinds continues with mono and me going into a war zone he said the first thing i look for is the exit it's not how to get it

it's how to get out nobody sees your pictures there's no point going to these places rewind on al-jazeera. this is al-jazeera. and they're on the clock this is a news live from their home coming up in the next sixty minutes. nicolas maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power yes the u.s. vice president throws his weight behind attempts to get rid of venezuela's leader. i'm not concerned about his safety a call for help we hear from the wife of a sudanese antigovernment protests that he's been missing for nearly a week. there.