One thousand year ago , Abu Rayhan al - Biruni , a cardinal Asian learner , conceived the concept of specific gravitation , rejected creationism and argue that the Earth revolved around the sun . And now , grant to one prominent academic , he also deserves to be remember for discovering America .
At a recent group discussion bear in Washington , DC , Professor S. Frederick Starr — the president of the Central Asia - Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies — say that Biruni ’s tools “ were not wooden boat powered by sail and brawny rower , but an adroit combination of cautiously controlled observance , meticulously assembled quantitative data and stringent logic . ”
Asreportedin Science :
For the purpose of on the nose determining the qiblah — the guidance of Mecca during Islamic prayers — Biruni meticulously recorded coordinates of the position he visited , and compiled data on thousands of other Eurasian settlements from other sources . After plotting out the known globe — possibly on a 5 - meter - tall Earth he is said to have constructed — he find that three - one-fifth of Earth ’s surface was unaccounted for .
“ The most obvious direction to account for this tremendous gap was to invoke the account that all geographer from ancientness down to Biruni ’s day had take , namely , that the Eurasiatic land mass was surrounded by a ‘ world sea , ' ” Starr relates … . Biruni winnow out that whimsey in a passing flagged by the Indian assimilator Sayyid Hasan Barani in the mid-1950s but pretermit in the decades since , Starr suppose . Biruni debate that the same forces that have rise to land on two - twenty percent of our major planet must have been at work in the other three - fifth . He conclude that one or more landmasses must lie down between Europe and Asia , penning , “ There is nothing to prohibit the existence of inhabited lands . ”
Not everyone agree with Starr ’s interpretation . “ We do n’t say that Copernicus ‘ expose ’ that the Earth moves around the sunshine simply based on the fact that he hypothesize that it does , ” enjoin Nathan Sidoli , a skill historian at Waseda University in Tokyo , “ so I do n’t see why we should say that al - Biruni ‘ discovered ’ the American continent . ”
But Robert van Gent , a specialist on the account of astronomy at Utrecht University , order , “ Assuming that the fundamental passages in Biruni ’s textual matter have been correctly read , I see no reason to exclude al - Biruni from the list of early ‘ discoverers ’ of America . ”
[ Source : Science magazine ]
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