Re: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

gordon brown wrote:
>
> There is another observation that I have not seen mentioned anywhere,
> but I wonder what the ancients may have thought about it. That is that
> no matter where you are, the highest point in the dome of the sky is
> exactly overhead.
>
> Gordon Brown (ASA member)
This wouldn't be an obvious observation because they probably considered
themselves as insurmountably removed from any edge of the flat earth by
large oceans surrounding them in every direction. So they would reason
that they can't get anywhere near close enough to the edge to see where
the dome or firmament would come down to meet the earth, and they would
be too far away from any part of the dome to have any perspective for
distance comparison. On the other hand, it was the angle differences of
the noon-solstice sun shining down on two removed points in Egypt that
Eratosthenes used to compute the circumference of the earth to
surprising accuracy. So maybe your question wasn't lost on everyone
back then.

What fascinates me is the reasoning (was it the early Greeks?) in which
they favored the ball because a sphere is the only simple shape that
wouldn't involve sudden discontinuities of contour somewhere (like a
flat disk or a cylinder would --giving you edges to contend with).

--merv

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Received on Tue Aug 19 19:50:11 2008