The ancients thought the earth was plana.También thought the Earth was the center of the universe.
The arguments of Aristotle
travelers who have arrived in southern Egypt and elsewhere are stars that are not in Greece, and vice versa. This indicates that the horizon and ours are not parallel, which is only possible if the Earth's surface is curved. The rate at which the stars appear and disappear while traveling is constant, so that the curvature is uniform.
Earth's shadow on the moon in a lunar eclipse is always round, regardless of day of the month and the height of satellite above horizon. If the shadow of an object is always round, regardless of the direction from which it is projected, this object must be a sphere.
When a ship approaches the coast, the first thing he sees is the top of the mast, and the sailors are first peak of the mountains of the coast. This indicates that the surface is convex, since the effect is the same in all directions and at all ports, the surface must be spherical.
Plato, Aristotle, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Alexander the Great and Pytheas of Marseilles, handled the concept of sphericity of the Earth as a common occurrence.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who was curator of the Library of Alexandria, had a certain known since ancient times in so-called Book of Thoth, which apparently were four, one of which concerned to all matters concerning our planet.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the earth. Eratosthenes was based, of course, the ideas of philosophers before him, especially those of Aristotle, but with a surprisingly practical.
Eratosthenes reasoned as follows: if Aristotle is right, then the height of the sun above the horizon at any given time changes as we move north or south.
For their experiments, Eratosthenes take as examples two cities, planted a column in Aswan - Upper Egypt - and one in Alexandria in Lower - each separated by 800 kilometers. In summer, at noon, the column kept Aswan shadow on the ground and at the same time, the cast of Alexandria itself. Sunlight
in Alexandria, forming an angle of 7 degrees 20 minutes. The projection to the center of the Earth from this, refutation, on the projection of the column of Aswan in the same direction, repeating the same angle, which was the fiftieth of the 360 \u200b\u200bdegrees of full circle.
Consequently, the circumference of the Earth should be equal to fifty times the 800 miles, ie 40,000 km. This calculation is so accurate that only now we know that your error has fluctuated between 150 and 200 kilometers.
But if the Earth was round, the shadows cast by the two poles of the same size in Aswan and Alexandria would be of different sizes.
Here Eratosthenes proved that the Earth was round, not only that, but also calculated that the value varies between 39,690 km and 46,620 km km. The real value is about 40,041 km, so the error of Eratosthenes is between 1% and 16% in the year 240 BC Awesome!
Galileo Galilei enunciated in 1610 that the Milky Way was like a swarm of stars, which earned him the persecution of the Inquisition.
This is planet Earth as never observe in reality: no water, flat, oddly dented ... This is recreation science made from real data. The Earth is not round!
The GOCE satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) has managed to obtain the most accurate model yet seen the Earth's gravitational field.
2001: A Space Odyssey (2001 : A Space Odyssey )
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