Persia was a cradle of science in earlier times. Persian scientists contributed to the current understanding of nature, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy.

Persians made important contributions to algebra and chemistry, invented the wind-power machine, and the first distillation of alcohol.
Trying to revive the golden times of Persian science, Iran's scientists cautiously reach out to the world. Many individual Iranian scientists, along with the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences and Academy of Sciences of Iran, are involved in this revival.
Iran is an example of a country that has made considerable advances through education and training, despite international sanctions in almost all aspects of research during the past 30 years. Iran's university population swelled from 100,000 in 1979 to 2 million in 2006.
Seventy percent of its science and engineering students are women. Iran's scientific progress is reported to be the fastest in the world. It has made great strides in different sectors, including aerospace, nuclear science, medical development, as well as stem cell and cloning research.
Science in Persia evolved in two main phases separated by the arrival and widespread adoption of Islam in the region. Many of today's concepts in science including the Helio-Centric model of solar system, finite speed of light, and gravity were first proposed by Persian scientists.
- Ancient technology in Persia
Qanat (a water management system used for irrigation) originated in pre-Achaemenid Persia. The oldest and largest known qanat is in the Iranian city of Gonabad which, after 2,700 years, still provides drinking and agricultural water to nearly 40,000 people.
Persian philosophers and inventors may have created the first batteries (sometimes known as the Baghdad Battery) in the Parthian or Sassanid eras. Some have suggested that the batteries may have been used medicinally.
Other scientists believe the batteries were used for electroplating—transferring a thin layer of metal to another metal surface—a technique still used today and the focus of a common classroom experiment.
Wind wheels were developed by the Babylonians 1700 BC to pump water for irrigation. In the 7th century, Persian engineers in Greater Iran developed a more advanced wind-power machine, the windmill, building upon the basic model developed by the Babylonians.
- Mathematics The 12th century mathematician Muhammad Ibn Musa-al-Kharazmi created the Logarithm table, developed algebra and expanded upon Persian and Indian arithmetic systems. His writings we re-translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona under the title: De jebra et almucabola.
Robert of Chester also translated it under the title Liber algebras et almucabala. The works of Kharazmi ""exercised a profound influence on the development of mathematical thought in the medieval West"".
Other Persian scientists included Abu Abbas Fazl Hatam, the Banu Musa brothers, Farahani, Omar Ibn Farakhan, Abu Zeid Ahmad Ibn Soheil Balkhi (9th century AD), Abul Vafa Bouzjani, Abu Jaafar Khan, Bijan Ibn Rostam Kouhi, Ahmad Ibn Abdul Jalil Qomi, Bu Nasr Araghi, Abu Reyhan Birooni, the noted Iranian poet Hakim Omar Khayyam Neishaburi, Qatan Marvazi, Massoudi Ghaznavi (13th century AD), Khajeh Nassireddin Tusi, and Ghiasseddin Jamshidi Kashani.
- Astronomy
In 1000 AD, Biruni wrote an astronomical encyclopaedia which discussed the possibility that the earth might rotate around the sun. This was before Tycho Brahe drew the first maps of the sky, using stylized animals to depict the constellations.
In the tenth century, the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi cast his eyes upwards to the awning of stars overhead and was the first to record a galaxy outwith our own. Gazing at the Andromeda galaxy he called it a ""little cloud"" - an apt description of the slightly wispy appearance of our galactic neighbour.
- Chemistry
Tusi believed that a body of matter is able to change but is not able to disappear entirely. He wrote ""a body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, color, and other properties, and turns into a different complex or elementary matter"".
Five hundred years later, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) created the law of conservation of mass, setting down this same idea.
[20] However, it should be noted that Tusi argued for evolution within a firmly Islamic context—he did not, like Darwin, draw materialist conclusions from his theories.
Moreover, unlike Darwin, he was arguing hypothetically: he did not attempt to provide empirical data for his theories. Nonetheless his arguments, which in some ways prefigure natural selection, are still considered remarkably 'advanced' for their time.
Jaber Ibn Hayyan, the famous Iranian chemist who died in 804 at Tous in Khorasan, was the father of a number of discoveries recorded in an encyclopaedia and of many treatises covering two thousand topics, and these became the bible of European chemists of the 18th century, particularly of Lavoisier.
These works had a variety of uses including tinctures and their applications in tanning and textiles; distillations of plants and flowers; the origin of perfumes; therapeutic pharmacy, and gunpowder, a powerful military instrument possessed by Islam long before the West.
Jabir ibn Hayyan, is widely regarded as the founder of chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and equipment still used by chemists today such as distillation.
- Physics
Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham is known in the West as Alhazen, born in 965 in Persia and dying in 1039 in Egypt. He is known as the father of optics for his writings on, and experiments with, lenses, mirrors, refraction, and reflection.
He correctly stated that vision results from light that is reflected into the eye by an object, not emitted by the eye itself and reflected back, as Aristotle believed.
He solved the problem of finding the locus of points on a spherical mirror from which light will be reflected to an observer. From his studies of refraction, he determined that the atmosphere has a definite height and that twilight is caused by refraction of solar radiation from beneath the horizon.
Biruni was the first scientist to formally propose that the speed of light is finite, before Galileo tried to experimentally prove this.
Kamal al-Din Al-Farisi (1267–1318) born in Tabriz, Iran, is known for giving the first mathematically satisfactory explanation of the rainbow, and an explication of the nature of colours that reformed the theory of Ibn al-Haytham.
Al-Farisi also ""proposed a model where the ray of light from the sun was refracted twice by a water droplet, one or more reflections occurring between the two refractions."" He verified this through extensive experimentation using a transparent sphere filled with water and a camera obscura. He is also the first who scientifically explains the rainbow.
- Science in modern Iran
Considering the country's brain drain and its poor political relationship with the United States and some other Western countries, Iran's scientific community remains productive, even while economic sanctions make it difficult for universities to buy equipment or to send people to the United States to attend scientific meetings.
Furthermore, Iran considers scientific backwardness, as one of the root causes of political and military bullying by developed countries over undeveloped states.
After the Iranian Revolution, there have been efforts by the religious scholars to assimilate Islam with modern science and this is seen by some as the reason behind the recent successes of Iran to augment its scientific output.
Currently Iran aims for a national goal of self sustainment in all scientific arenas. The Comprehensive Scientific Plan has been devised based on about 51,000 pages of documents and includes 224 scientific projects which must be implemented by the year 2025.
- Budget
Iran's national science budget was about $900 million in 2005 and it had not been subject to any significant increase for the previous 15 years. By early 2000, Iran allocated around 0.4% of its GDP to R&D, which ranked it ""far behind industrialized societies"" and the world average of 1.4%.
By 2009 this ratio of research to GDP reached 0.87% and the set target is 2.5% to be reached by 2015. Iran's government has devoted huge amounts of funds for research on high technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, stem cell research and information technology (2008).
Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology and the National Research Institute for Science Policy are two of the main institutions, depending on the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, in charge of establishing research policies at the state level.
In 2006, Iranian government wiped out the financial debts of all universities in a bid to relieve their budget constraints. According to UNESCO science report 2010, most of the research in Iran is government funded with the Iranian government providing almost 75% of all research funding.
The share of private businesses in total national R&D funding according to the same report is very low being just 14% as compared with the Turkey's 48%. The rest of approximately 11% of funding comes from higher education sector and non-profit organizations.
In 2009, Iranian government formulated a 15 year comprehensive national plan for science focused on higher education and strengthening the links between academia and industry in order to promote a knowledge based economy.
As per the plan by year 2030, Iran's research and development spending is to be increased to 4% of GDP from 0.59% of 2006 and increasing its education spending to over 7% of GDP from the 2007 level of 5.49%.
- Iran now the world’s 21st leading scientific nation
Trying to revive the golden times of Persian science, Iran's scientists cautiously reach out to the world. Many individual Iranian scientists, along with the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences and Academy of Sciences of Iran*, are involved in this revival.
Iran is an example of a country that has made considerable advances through education and training, despite international sanctions in almost all aspects of research during the past 30 years. Iran's university population swelled from 100,000 in 1979 to 2 million in 2006.
Seventy percent of its science and engineering students are women. Iran's scientific progress is reported to be the fastest in the world. It has made great strides in different sectors, including aerospace, nuclear science, medical development, as well as stem cell and cloning research.
The International Statistical Institute issued a report on May 31 2011, putting Iran in 21st place in the ISI rankings, which represents a breakthrough for the country’s scientific establishment.
Islamic World Science Citation Database (ISC) Director Jafar Mehrad made the announcement on Tuesday, ISNA reported.
(Source: wikipedia and staff)
Caption: Laleh Park’s southwestern entrance with a statue of Biruni, a medieval Persian astronomer. -- The university has joined Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Health services, recently. (Source: wikipedia and staff )