By IANS
Dubai : The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Abu Dhabi’s Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT) and Cosmology Centre of California University to develop a mega complex for training and research in science and humanities.
The MoU to develop the Plaza of Intelligence and Innovation City, which will come up by 2015, was signed this week, WAM news agency said.
The new plaza will have an academy for mathematics and science, a research centre and a museum of space science, a planetarium, an IMAX (3-dimensional theatre for documentaries) hall and an astro sculpture park.
George Smoot, director of the Cosmology Centre, said the complex will be based on the concept of the 9th century Arab centre of excellence Bayt Al Hikma — The House of Wisdom.
“This was a scientific institution in the Abbasid period, founded in Baghdad by caliph Al Mamun,” he said.
Smoot, the 2006 physics Nobel laureate, said that he was trying “to bring back to life the House of Wisdom, which was one of the most important scientific institutions in the Arab civilization”.
Apart from translations of philosophical and scientific works from the Persian and Greek originals, Bayt Al Hikma also established two astronomical observatories in Baghdad and Damascus. The Mongols destroyed it during their invasion in 1258.
“The institution held such a great number of works that, according to a legend, the waters of the Tigris turned black with ink from the enormous number of books which were dumped into the river,” Smoot added.