Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help it get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about the man who invented the scientific

method, the story of America's first beach, and how many faces the average person can recognize.

Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.

Pop quiz, who invented the scientific method? Can you name him?

Kind of weird, right? You know the names Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton,

but what about the guy who, you know, kind of invented science?

This is a story that'll enlighten history and science buffs.

Do you know this before you worked at Curiosity, Ashley?

I did not.

Yeah, it's just lost to the pages of

history it's kind of surprising to me that someone invented the scientific

method at all but someone had to yeah everyone to, I guess everything has to be invented. Yeah. Well, history is full of forgotten heroes, and one of those heroes is Ibn Al-Hafim. He was born in what is now Basra, Iraq, sometime around 965 CE.

The details of his life are a bit fuzzy, but we do know that around the dawn of the

11th century, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, and he had an unfortunate habit of getting on the

wrong people's bad side. He had an administrative job that he did kind of poorly and

according to a 13th century account he had to feign madness to protect himself from the wrath of a caliph.

Fortunately, he didn't get a death sentence, but he was placed under house arrest for not doing what his boss wanted.

It's not that a comfy prison full of scientific texts and tools was exactly

what Al-Hatham needed. Over the next decade he proved that light travels in a

straight line, he demonstrated how mirrors work, and he made

the compelling and correct argument that light bends when it travels through water.

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