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The spherical shape of the Earth was known and measured by astronomers, mathematicians, and navigators from a variety of literate ancient cultures, including the Hellenic World, and Ancient India. Greek ethnographer Megasthenes , c. 300 BC , has been interpreted as stating that the contemporary Brahmans of India believed in a spherical Earth as ...
The roughly spherical shape of Earth can be empirically evidenced by many different types of observation, ranging from ground level, flight, or orbit. The spherical shape causes a number of effects and phenomena that combined disprove flat Earth beliefs . These include the visibility of distant objects on Earth's surface; lunar eclipses ...
Second, Earth seems to be unmoving from the perspective of an earthbound observer; it feels solid, stable, and stationary. Ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and medieval philosophers usually combined the geocentric model with a spherical Earth, in contrast to the older flat-Earth model implied in some mythology.
t. e. In geodesy, the figure of the Earth is the size and shape used to model planet Earth. The kind of figure depends on application, including the precision needed for the model. A spherical Earth is a well-known historical approximation that is satisfactory for geography, astronomy and many other purposes.
Muslim scholars who held to the spherical Earth theory used it to calculate the distance and direction from any given point on Earth to Mecca. Muslim mathematicians developed spherical trigonometry ; [57] in the 11th century, al-Biruni used it to find the direction of Mecca from many cities and published it in The Determination of the Co ...
In the 4th century BC Greece, philosophers developed the geocentric model, based on astronomical observation; this model proposed that the center of the Universe lies at the center of a spherical, stationary Earth, around which the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars rotate. With the development of the heliocentric model by Nicolaus Copernicus in the ...
The Bedford Level experiment was a series of observations carried out along a 6-mile (10 km) length of the Old Bedford River on the Bedford Level of the Cambridgeshire Fens in the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries to deny the curvature of the Earth through measurement. Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who conducted the first ...
Members of the Flat Earth Society and other flat-Earthers claim that NASA and other government agencies conspire to fabricate evidence that the Earth is spherical. [88] According to the most widely spread version of current flat-Earth theory, NASA is guarding the Antarctic ice wall that surrounds Earth. [88]