![]() ![]() Today, the society claims more than 500 members on its roster. ![]() According to Smithsonian Magazine, membership in the Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, once reached 3,500 people. No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round - say, pictures taken from space - are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. We can measure this very accurately using satellites, which is important for all sorts of applications including understanding climate, volcanoes and earthquakes.But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents. 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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