well if thats the case the earth is round point proving end of discussion because if the earth was flat sunlight would be distributed evenly.
No, it wouldn't. If the Earth were a spherical bowl with a sun at the center, then it would be distributed evenly. But, much as the words are sour in my mouth, a point source at a finite distance from a flat surface does not irradiate the surface uniformly.
So yeah, remainder of paragraph -- including childing inflammatory trash -- rendered meaningless.
ow big a stick would you need to measure the planet? A thousand miles long? A million? How about three feet? That ought to be enough to do it, as an ancient Alexandrian man named Eratosthenes figured out.
Eratosthenes was a multi-talented man who lived in the third century B.C. He was puzzled one day to read that at noon on the 21st of June, pillars in the Egyptian town of Syrene cast no shadows. There is nothing so odd about this--anything sticking vertically out of the ground will cast no shadow when the sun is standing straight overhead. What was odd, he thought, was that when he tried the experiment in Alexandria at the same time of day, a stick held vertically did cast a shadow.
How is this possible? If the earth is flat, all shadows should be the same. There would be no difference between noon in Syrene and noon in Alexandria. It's only if the earth is curved, Eratosthenes correctly guessed, that the shadows change lengths depending on how far north or south you are.
To visualize this, you can imagine a sheet of paper with two toothpicks stuck in it, several inches apart, and a lamp shining down from overhead. Neither toothpick casts a shadow. Bend the paper at one end, though, and the tilted toothpick begins to have one. The more you bend it, the longer the shadow. In fact, once he had this insight into the shape of the earth, Eratosthenes was also able to correctly calculate its circumference by applying a little geometry.
He imagined his two sticks--one in the northern town of Syrene, one in the southern town of Alexandria--as lines extending downward until they meet at the center of the earth. Drawing more lines coming straight down to represent sunlight, Eratosthenes moved one stick along the outside of the circle until the shadow it would be casting matched the shadow his stick actually made. Now he knew how much of the circle extended between Syrene and Alexandria--about seven degrees.
There's no fancy way to get around the next step: Eratosthenes needed to know the actual distance from Alexandria to Syrene. So he paid some camel caravan drivers to go from one town to the other and tell him how far it was. A few achy-footed camels later the answer came back: 530 miles. So, if 530 miles equals 7 degrees of the circle, the whole circle must be 25,000 miles.
Eratosthenes' answer, deduced with nothing but two sticks, some tired camels and a brain, is within a few percent of being correct.
A Moment of Science®
http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/stick.html