He was a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born a thousand years ago in this region of Central Asia, calculated Earth's circumference with astounding accuracy and invented specific gravity, the measure of a substance's density compared to that of water. He rejected creationism, accepted that time has neither a beginning nor an end, and-5 centuries before Copernicus-argued that the sun might be the center of the solar system. Now, an influential scholar has proposed adding another laurel to that list: inferring the existence of America.
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