The standard of proof is higher, they say. Or possibly you rely on the testimony of astronauts. Consider one, standard, flat-earth line: “Can you prove the world is round?” Maybe you point to the ( often artificially assembled) photos of Earth from space. We can measure this very accurately using satellites, which is important for all sorts of applications including understanding climate, volcanoes and earthquakes.Philosophy can explain why. It is also slightly lumpy, due to variations in the density of the material it is made up of. These days, we also know that the Earth isn’t really a sphere – it’s a slightly flattened ellipsoid (egg shape), mainly due to the fact that it is spinning. We now know the Earth’s circumference is just over 40000 km, so Eratosthenes was amazingly close. To find out more about Eratosthenes Measuring the Earth, read this article. This meant the circumference of Earth was about 50 x 790 km = 39500 km. He picked Alexandria, about 790 km from Syene (measured by camel travel!), and he showed the angle at Alexandria was about 7.2 degrees, or about 1/50 of a complete circle. Eratosthenes realised that if he could measure the angle of a shadow cast by a stick at noon on the same day somewhere much further north (or south), and he knew the distance to that place, he could calculate the curvature of the Earth. He had heard about a well in Syene (now Aswan, Egypt) where at noon on the summer solstice (21st June), the sun would be directly overhead and so shine straight down the well, without casting any shadow.
Then about 240 BC Eratosthenes devised an experiment to estimate the Earth’s circumference. The Ancient Greeks noticed that the shape of the Earth passing across the moon during a lunar eclipse was a crescent, which means the Earth has to be curved. Read this article from NASA which includes an answer to 'how do we know the earth is round?'.Īmazingly, we’ve known the Earth is round for over 2000 years.
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