What really happpened to make the people think earth was round happened
long long ago, in a far distant land!Well, not really that far distant, largely, Greece, northern Africa (Egypt, Libya etc), the Middle East and India.
Why do so many attack the Globe and Heliocentrism as "modern developments"?
They are demonstrably not modern at all.
The following is "borrowed" from a list put together by
InFlatEarth, a
flat earther, but justifiably proud of his Greek heritage.
These quotes from
InFlatEarth pretty well map out the history of the Globe and heliocentrism hypotheses (as I guess they were then) till the time before Copernicus.
- Pythagoras of Samos (569-500 B.C.). Mathematician and philosopher. Was to first to believe that the Earth was a sphere rotating around a central fire. He believed that the natural order could be expressed in numbers. Known for the Pythagorean theorem which was however known much earlier (From the Babylonians and perhaps earlier from the Chinese).
- Parmenides of Elea (520-450 B.C.). Like Pythagoras, he believed that the Earth was spherical.
- Philolaus (Tarentum or Croton, now Italy, 480-??? B.C.). Pythagorean philosopher. Was the first to suggest that there is some central fire around which the Earth, sun, moon and all planets rotate.
- Oenopides (Chios, 480-??? B.C.). Greek philosopher. Believed to have first calculated the angle the Earth is tipped with respect to the plane of its orbit. He found the value of 24 degrees which differs only half degree from the presently accepted value of 23.5 degrees.
- Democritus (Abdera, Thrace, 470-380 B.C.). Greek philosopher. Expanded the concept of atoms that was introduced by his teacher Leucippus and showed that atoms are the basis of all form of matter. He recognizes that the Milky Way consists of a number of stars and that the moon is similar to Earth.
- Inopedes (400 B.C. ?). Greek astronomer. Discovered the obliqueness of the elliptic orbit.
- Heracleides (Heraclea, 390-320 B.C.). Greek astronomer. First to suggest that Venus and Mars may orbit the sun. Also suggested the the Earth rotates around its axis once every 24 hours.
- Pytheas (330 B.C.). Greek geographer and explorer. Sailed into the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea where he observed the strong Atlantic tides. He correctly assumed that these were caused by the moon.
- Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 B.C.). Proposed that the sun is at the center of the universe with Earth along with the other planets circulating around it. He estimated the distance of the sun from the Earth by observing the angle between the sun and the moon when it is exactly half full.
- Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-200 B.C.).. Greek astronomer and mathematician. Calculated the circumference of the Earth and finds a figure of 46,000 km which is close to the present measured value. Also lays down the first lines of longitude on a map of Earth. He also developed a method for calculating all prime numbers: the sieve of Eratosthenes.
- Seleucus (Seleucia, 190-??? B.C.). Last known astronomer to champion the heliocentric theory of the solar system until Copernicus.
- Hipparchus of Nicea (190-120 B.C.) Greek astronomer and mathematician. Developed a system of planetary motion with the Earth at the center. This system was later refined by Ptolemy. Used data from a total eclipse of the sun and parallax to determine correctly the distance and size of the moon. The same data gave values for the distance and size of the sun an order of magnitude smaller than their actual values.
- Poseidonius (Apamea, 140-50 B.C.). Incorrectly calculated the Earth's circumference, which 1500 year later, led Columbus to believe that Asia was only about 3000 miles west of Europe.
- Ptolemy (c. AD 100 – c. 170). Last great Alexandrian astronomer. Refined the system of planetary motion developed by Hipparchus, which had Earth at the center of the universe. Best known for his Almagest
I suppose you have noted that all of these believed that the earth was a Globe and many found evidence that clearly points that way.
What I have found amazing is the amount of detail they managed to find, even without any modern intruments.
The measured the circumference of the earth, the distance to the moon, the size of the moon, estimated the distance to the sun (very rough, but a huge distance away), the tilt of the earth's axis and knew about the precession of the equinoxes.
By 1000 AD, the radius of the Globe was measured to within 1% of the current value.
Some even proposed the
heliocentric globe before the Indian mathematician Aryabhata (AD 476–550) and Copernicus (1473 AD-1543 AD).
The Globe was the accepted shape from around 300 BC and well before Copernicus, there was some support for heliocentrism in India and even Persia.
There is no doubt at all that the Heliocentric Globe model dates back hundreds of years and its acceptance has nothing to do with modern science, though the findings of modern science certainly support it.
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