Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: chris on 14/06/2015 16:02:48
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Ancient thinkers knew the Earth was round and they also had a concept of how large it is. What methods did they employ to achieve these findings?
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I read somewhere that they used height of masts on water, but before that when building wells they noticed that different stars could be seen from widely spaced wells. That told them they were not looking up parallel but at diverging angle, rest is geometry.
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Ancient thinkers knew the Earth was round and they also had a concept of how large it is. What methods did they employ to achieve these findings?
It was assumed to be spherical due to the shadow the Earth cast on the moon when the Earth eclipsed the moon. To determine it's radius, one experiment utilized poles. Each pole was constructed very straight and were erected precisely vertical. Then at the same time of the day they took measurements of the shadows the poles cast and from those measurements they could get a rough estimate of the radius of the Earth.
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There was one particular well in which the sun could be seen being reflected back up at midday in the middle of summer. Further north such a thing never occurred. Someone, I forget who but it's discussed in the first edition of Karl Sagan's series Cosmos, went several hundred miles further north to measure the angle of the sun at midday at the same time of year and came up with a very accurate calculation of the size of the Earth.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
Erastosthenes determined the radius of the Earth by the method described by PmbPhy: by measuring the difference in declension of the sun at two distant points on the Earth, and using some simple geometric relations, he was able to calculate the radius of the Earth with reasonable precision (error of 1-20%, depending on how we convert the ancient distance metrics t our own...)