When the audience is known to be secretly skeptical of the reality that is being impressed upon them, we have been ready to appreciate their tendency to pounce upon trifling flaws as a sign that the whole show is false [Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self (New York: Anchor Press, 1959), p. 51]. I - v - Give Me Seventeen Dollars for This Hat. Taxed by the forces besetting Damascus, the Sultan accedes to familial intrigue. The noted medical talk show host, Mr. Ng, surges to stage a live remote into the 13 th century. The various tools at his command are listed. The participants gather: the Idiopath of Jerusalem, the chorus, the Emperor Frederick II, al-Kamil, Sultan of Egypt, and the Rabbi Ben ‘tov Shapiro. A debate over the independence of scientific thought, in which the Idiopath disputes the Frankish titles in Palestine, ensues. Al-Kamil also cites numerous correspondences contesting these claims. ~ page 63 ~ People showing up for a diagnosis of a sample of their urine to the physician Constantine the African.* Constantine Act I, Signature v - (1) Latin Constantinus Africanus Born c. 1020, Carthage or Sicily Died 1087, monastery of Monte Cassino, near Cassino, Principality of Benevento Medieval medical scholar. He was the first to translate Arabic medical works into Latin. His 37 translated books included The Total Art , a short version of The Royal Book by the 10th-century Persian physician 'Alī ibn al-'Abbās, introducing Islam's extensive knowledge of Greek medicine to the West. His translations of Hippocrates and Galen first gave the West a view of Greek medicine as a whole. *[Image & caption and following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: The first of his works of translation from Arabic to Latin was the Complete Book of the Medical Art , from the kitab al-malaki (Royal Book) of the 10th-century Persian physician 'Ali ibn al-'Abbas, in 1087. This text was the first comprehensive Arabic medical text. Shortly after, the work came to be known as the Pantegni , “complete art”. The significance of this text was that it was an important resource for the student of the transmission of scientific ideas inasmuch as the Complete Book of the Medical Art contains a compilation of 128 known manuscripts. This text also contains a survey of the 108 known Latin manuscripts of Constantine the African. This text rapidly became part of the standard medical curriculum for students. His 37 translated books from Arabic to Latin introduced extensive knowledge of Greek and Islamic medicine to the West. Among them were two treatises by Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, or Isaac the Jew, the greatest Jewish physician of the Western Caliphate of Córdoba, whose translations of Hippocrates and Galen first gave the West a view of Greek medicine as a whole. ~ page 64 ~ Camera obscura in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 1751.* camera obscura Act I, Signature v - (2) Device for recording an image of an object on a light-sensitive surface (see photography). It is essentially a light- tight box with an opening (aperture) to admit light focused onto a sensitized film or plate. All cameras have included five crucial components: (1) the camera box, which holds and protects the sensitive film from all light except that entering through the lens; (2) film, on which the image is recorded; (3) the light control, consisting of an aperture or diaphragm and a shutter, both often adjustable; (4) the lens, which focuses the light rays from the subject onto the film, creating the image; and (5) the viewing system, which may be separate from the lens system (usually above it) or may operate through it by means of a mirror. The camera was inspired by the camera obscura —a dark enclosure with an aperture (usually provided with a lens) through which light enters to form an image of outside objects on the opposite surface—and was developed by Nicephore Niepce and L.-J.-M. Daguerre in the early 19th century. *[Image & caption credit and following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: The first mention of the principles behind the pinhole camera, a precursor to the camera obscura, belongs to Mo-Ti (470 BC to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohism [Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China: Vol. 4, "Physics and Physical Technology, Part 1: Physics" (Taipei: Caves Books Ltd., 1986, p. 82]. Mo- Ti referred to this camera as a "collecting plate" or "locked treasure room [Ouellette, Jennifer, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2005), p. 52]." The Mohist tradition is unusual in Chinese thought because it is concerned with developing principles of logic. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 BC) understood the optical principle of the pinhole camera. He viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve, and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree. The first camera obscura was built by the scientist Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, born in Basra (965–1039 AD), known in the West as Alhacen or Alhazen, who carried out practical experiments on optics in his Book of Optics [Wade, Nicholas J., Finger, Stanley, "The eye as an optical instrument: from camera obscura to Helmholtz's perspective," Perception 30 (10): 1157–1177 (2001)]. Most of his professional career was spent in Cairo, where he was summoned for his first engineering task of regulating the flow of the Nile river [citation needed]. In his optical experiments, Ibn Al-Haitham used the term Al-Bayt al-Muthlim, translated in English as "dark room [citation needed]." In the experiment he undertook, in order to establish that light travels in time and with speed, he observed: "If the hole was covered with a curtain and the curtain was taken off, the light travelling from the hole to the opposite wall will consume time [citation needed]." He repeated the experience when he established that light travels in straight lines [citation needed]. A revealing experiment introduced the camera obscura in studies of the half-moon shape of the sun's image during eclipses which he observed on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters.[citation needed] In his famous essay "On the form of the Eclipse (Maqalah-fi-Surat-al-Kosuf)," he commented on his observation: "The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle [citation needed]." In his experiment on sunlight he extended his observation of the penetration of light through a pinhole to conclude that when the sunlight reaches and penetrates the hole it makes a conic shape at the points meeting at the pinhole, forming later another conic shape reverse to the first one on the opposite wall in the dark room [citation needed]. until it reaches an aperture and is projected through it onto a ”ا“ This happens when sunlight diverges from point screen at the luminous spot. Since the distance between the aperture and the screen is insignificant in comparison to the distance between the aperture and the sun, the divergence of sunlight after going through the aperture should be insignificant. However, it is observed to be much greater when the paths of the rays which form the extremities of the cone are retraced in the reverse direction, it is found that they meet at a point outside the aperture and then diverge again toward the sun as illustrated in the figure. This an early accurate description of the Camera Obscura phenomenon. With a second hole the image is doubled [citation needed]. Damascus cityscape, by Ahmadac, November 23, 2009.* Damascus Act I, Signature v - (3) Arabic Dimashq City (pop., 1994: 1,549,932), capital of Syria. Located at an oasis at the base of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, it has been an important population centre since antiquity. Believed to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, it has evidence of occupation from the 4th millennium BC. The first written reference to it is found in Egyptian tablets of the 15th century BC, and biblical sources refer to it as the capital of the Aramaeans. It changed hands repeatedly over the centuries, belonging to Assyria in the 8th century BC, then Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. It remained under the control of Rome and its successor state, the Byzantine Empire, until it fell to the Arabs in 635 AD. Damascus flourished as the capital of the Umayyad dynasty, and the remains of their Great Mosque still stand. *[Image & caption credit and following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: Damascus lies about 80 km (50 mi) inland from the Mediterranean Sea, sheltered by the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. It lies on a plateau 680 metres (2,230 ft) above sea-level. The old city of Damascus, enclosed by the city walls, lies on the south bank of the river Barada which is almost dry (3 cm left). To the south-east, north and north-east it is surrounded by suburban areas whose history stretches back to the Middle Ages: Midan in the south-west, Sarouja and Imara in the north and north-west. These districts originally arose on roads leading out of the city, near the tombs of religious figures. In the nineteenth century outlying villages developed on the slopes of Jabal Qasioun, overlooking the city, already the site of the al-Salihiyah district centred around the important shrine of Sheikh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi.