The shape of the earth is spherical-like a ball…is this true or is it only a scientific guess?
The reason im saying this is because, the earth has almost always been viewed from a lense- a convex lense mostly. Is it possible that the shape of the earth only appears round because as the light rays pass through the lense they bend at a certain angle and the image that forms is a result of this ‘bending’. Can it be possible that if the Earth is viewed from a “special” lense, in which light rays can be bent differently, will this show a different shape of the earth from the space?
To answer your question, no. That’s not how light works. Not at all. If this isn’t a whoosh I can only hope you’re a Flat Earther. The answer is either a) if that’s how light worked everything would look round or b) you’re talking about a vast conspiracy by multiple government agencies to dupe the public into thinking the earth is round. Seriously. Government doing anything on a grand scale? no.
This new learning amazes me Todderbob. Explain again how sheeps’ bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
Eyeballs are lenses, too. So why would you trust anything that you personally see?
Of course, if the earth weren’t an almost perfect sphere then the math we use for moving from one place to another on it - math that is called spherical geometry and can only work on the outside of a sphere - wouldn’t work. Yet it does. This is independent confirmation that doesn’t rely on observation.
EDIT: I clicked on that column and it got shut down because an attempt was made to infect my computer. I’m not going back to check what was on it but somebody needs to.
Take a camera. It uses a convex lens. Take a picture of a box (you know, a thing with lots of right angled corners). Does the picture look like a sphere?
…and hence, is yet another example of Intelligent Design. 'Cause, you know…it fits so perfectly in God’s hand…and has a little tab at the end to peel it open…stop looking at me like that!
My point was only that it’s possible to change the apparent shape of an object by changing the shape of the lenses it’s viewed through.
It would be entirely pointless and counterproductive to do so, but it’s possible. You would have more success elongating than blunting an object, but generally it’s not impossible.
It wasn’t “measured,” but IIRC (and I’m not sure I do) there was an ancient Egyptian, pre-dating the Greek empire, who had a theory of a heliocentric universe and had the circumference of the Earth down quite close, but I can’t find more information about that.
On the other hand, Aristarchus of Samos measured the length of a year very accurately (circa 230 BC).
What I did find, however, was the record of Eratosthenes, whose story matches the one that I recalled from earlier (which I think I must’ve conflated with one of the Muslim world, my bad), which had an error rate of only about 5 or 10 percent. Is that accurate enough to qualify?
Other than that not being even remotely related to this thread… why would I have any idea that was the next question being posed?
Why would we assume that it was smaller 10 million years ago?
Why would we assume that it was something contrary to evidence? Evidence we have, geologically, indicates that the Earth itself was the same size. Are you implying that matter somehow spontaneously was created, or that it came from somewhere else? Or that it came from outer space? Because the Earth has had mass introduced over the past 10 million years, from outer space. Not an insignificant amount, mind you, but nothing that’s really noteworthy.