this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
7 points (100.0% liked)

Moving to: m/AskMbin!

63 readers
9 users here now

### We are moving! **Join us in our new journey as we take a new direction towards the future for this community at mbin, find our new community here and read this post to know more about why we are moving. Thank you and we hope to see you there!**

founded 1 year ago
 

To me, it's: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.

We have records from around 430BC where Greek philosophers spoke of the Earth being a sphere. In 240BC the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and was only about 2% out.

all 17 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

That's a good one. I was thinking older history, but trickle-down economics has had a long enough run of endless disaster without any hint of trucking down for long enough now that we know it doesn't work. If only we could keep it in the history books!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In general that old math theorems/ideas are named after the mathematicians who discovered them.

Pythagoras didn't discover the Pythagorean Theorem. Pascal didn't discover Pascal's Triangle. Fibonacci didn't discover the Fibonacci Sequence.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

To me, it's: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.

Ancient peoples DID think the Earth was flat.

The conception of a spherical earth was only widely accepted in academic traditions derived from late Greek philosophy and even in those cultures, had a mixed reception in popular conceptions of the earth's shape until the 16th century.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The question is not if they did or did not think, but if what they thinked was backed by historical facts at the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yes. It was backed by the oldest book of events at that time.
There were mathematicians that wrote against Galileo, and a notable one, a Dominican I think.
Everything in the past moves to the category of belief.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

The idea that historically people were somehow less, or more intelligent than people today.

Saying things like "ancient people knew over 300 plants and what they do" as if this is somehow amazing. Kids can name 300 Pokemon, and their movesets and how they relate to eachother. Your sportsfan cowoker can name their top 100 players and all their stats. This is not amazing, we just focus on other things nowadays.

Nor were ancient people stupid. Obviously they noticed things like certain events happening at fixed times of the year. They just didn't have encyclopedias, but they did have centuries of passed-down knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It depends which ancient people. That may be what thought in Greece, but what about elsewhere? Also a lot of Greek and Roman knowledge was lost by the dark ages or ever made it to Europe at all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Knowledge of a spherical earth was never lost amongst serious academics in post-Roman Europe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Sun dial proves flat earth.
Just imagine a sun dial on a ball earth.
You need a very strong belief to believe in ball earth.

Check out 4 Kings 20:11 (Go and read it).
We always believed rightly until people started believing imaginations and fancies.
So few years before Christ, we had few fanciful school of thoughts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

1 Kings , 2 Kings , 3 Kings, 4 Kings. (1st naming system).
1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings. (2nd naming system).
I used the first naming system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Speaking to all:
How did Eratosthenes get the circumference of the earth?
The length of shadows.
Now for those who believe such a science:

Let us pretend the earth is a ball.
In 24 hours, let us take the distance between the earth and the sun to be constant (not changing) (change negligible).
But in that same 24 hours, no shadow, short shadow, long shadow, very long shadow could be obtained.
So, constant distance, changing shadows.
Inference:
You cannot obtain the distance of the sun from shadows.
Conclusion:
If the distance of the sun cannot be obtained, Eratosthenes is finished!

Let us return to our senses.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Where does the distance to the sun enter into this equation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Did he make an assumption about the distance of the sun?
Did he assume parallel rays?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You're forgetting one crucial detail about Eratosthenes' experiment: the measurements were taken at the same time, noon on the summer solstice, the time of minimum shadow length in both locations.