Sythe Users: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Lets Find Out! #3

Wtf is this bs lmao

 

I'm a fuckin scholar

 

that was my initial answer but he attributed it to perspective

 

Damnit, I was going to say use a pendulum but that seemed like it was overly explaining it..

 

I'm pretty sure this is like one of the first lessons you learn about in physics.

Place two poles several meters high on either end of the country (eastern and western ends), simultaneously measure the shadows, the curvature of the earth means the sun hits the pole at different angles and the shadows will vary in length because of this difference.

 

you didn't account for the fact that the sun is a spotlight

 

But the sun isn't a spotlight, so that logic is false


The original problem never said that the people of this man's land didn't understand what the sun was, nor that the sun is a spot light in his world. Therefore, the theory is conclusive imo

And if two poles aren't conclusive enough to prove that the big burning ball of fire in the sky isn't actually a 1000W spotlight, then place a row of poles, one meter apart along the length of the country. Poles vanishing beneath the horizon shows curvature, gradual increase in shadow length suggests distance from the objects to the light source, ruling out possible perspective ambiguity based on distance. The effect could only be accomplished with a curving surface then

 

it's all fun and games until Sythe comes and tells you to prove sun is not a spotlight

 

Smart way to have people do your homework lol

 

If you were both curious and scientifically-minded, you might go out after sunset during the next few days to see what happened next. In fact, if you were to go outside and look towards the southwest skies (assuming you, like me, live in the Northern hemisphere) during the coming days of September 29th to October 3rd, at sunset (~6:30 PM) each night, you’d notice something changing about the Moon

Not only does it appear to shift position by about 12 degrees each night, moving farther away from the Sun, but it appears that progressively more and more of it gets illuminated! And you would (rightly) conclude that perhaps the Moon orbits the Earth, and that its apparent change in phase is caused by light from the Sun illuminating different parts of a spherically-shaped Moon.

In fact, this is both the ancient and modern view of what causes the phases of the Moon.

Not only does it appear to shift position by about 12 degrees each night, moving farther away from the Sun, but it appears that progressively more and more of it gets illuminated! And you would (rightly) conclude that perhaps the Moon orbits the Earth, and that its apparent change in phase is caused by light from the Sun illuminating different parts of a spherically-shaped Moon.

In fact, this is both the ancient and modern view of what causes the phases of the Moon.


But this doesn’t tell you whether the Earth is a flat disc or a round sphere; it only tells you that the shadow cast by the Earth is circular. In principle, just from looking at the Moon, the Earth could be either flat or round.



Answer:
If you follow the Sun’s path through the daytime sky, and you live in the Northern hemisphere, you’ll find that it rises in the eastern part of the sky, rises up to its apex in the south, and then lowers and sets in the west. And it does this every day of the year.

But it doesn’t take the exact same path every day out of the year; the Sun reaches a much higher point (and shines for more hours during the day) during the summer months, and reaches a significantly lower point (and shines for fewer hours) during the winter. To dramatically illustrate this, here’s a time-lapse photo of the Sun’s path through the sky taken during the winter solstice in Fairbanks, Alaska.


In fact, if you charted out the Sun’s path through the daytime sky, you would find that it takes its lowest path (for the fewest number of hours) on the Winter Solstice — usually December 21st — and its highest path (for the greatest number of hours) on the Summer Solstice, usually June 21st.

If you constructed a camera capable of photographing the Sun’s path through the sky over the course of the year, you would find exactly this: a series of arcs, where the highest, longest arc through the sky was made during the Summer Solstice and the lowest, shortest arc was made during the Winter Solstice.


While living in Alexandria, Eratosthenes received some amazing correspondence from the city of Syene in southern Egypt. In particular, it said that, on the Summer Solstice,

the shadow of someone looking down a deep well would block the reflection of the Sun at noon.

In other words, the Sun would be directly overhead at this time, not a single degree to the South, North, East or West. And if you had a completely vertical object, it would cast absolutely no shadow.

And the answer he got was one-fiftieth of a circle, or 7.2 degrees. But at this time, in Syene, the angle the Sun was making with an identical vertical stick was zero degrees! What could be causing this? In perhaps a stroke of genius, Eratosthenes realized that the Sun’s rays could all be parallel, and that the Earth could be curved!


And — like any good scientist — Eratosthenes did the experiment. By measuring the length of the shadow cast by a vertical stick during the solstice noon, he could figure out what angle the Sun made with the vertical direction at Alexandria.

f he could then figure out the distance from Alexandria to Syene, since he knew the angular difference between the two cities, he could figure out the circumference of the Earth! If only Eratosthenes had a grad student, he could have sent one to make the trip, and measure the distance!

Instead, he was forced to rely on the reported distance between the two cities. The most “precise” measurement of his day?

Travel-by-camel. (So I can understand criticisms of his accuracy.) Nevertheless, his results were that the distance between Syene and Alexandria were 5,000 stadia. The question, of course, is how big is a stadium? The answer depends, of course, on whether Eratosthenes, a Greek living in Egypt, was using an Attic stadium or an Egyptian stadium, something still debated among historians. An Attic stadium was used more commonly, and is 185 meters in modern terms. Using this value, one gets a circumference of the Earth of 46,620 kilometers, a number that’s only about 16% bigger than the actual value.

However, an Egyptian stadium is 157.5 meters, and it’s conceivable that’s what Eratosthenes meant. In that case, we get a value of 39,375 kilometers, which is off by less than 2% from the modern value of 40,041 km!

Regardless of what the actual values were, Eratosthenes went on to become the world’s first geographer, inventing the concepts of latitude and longitude that we still use today, and constructed the first models and maps based on a spherical Earth.

Although many things were “lost” during the subsequent millenium, neither the idea of a spherical Earth nor the rough knowledge of the Earth’s circumference were one of them. In fact, anyone can perform this same experiment today with two locations at the same longitude, and with simultaneous measurements of shadow lengths, you too can measure the circumference of the Earth! Not bad, considering that the first direct, photographic evidence of the Earth’s curvature would not arrive until 1946!


Much copy & paste & google much wow, inb4 sythe actually reads it all and shits on my googling skills ;(.



tl;dr=Raise Eratosthenes from the dead then ask him

 

Shut the hell up

 

@ Sythe


Your implying that we all exist within a state since ur testing if we "know" something? What is the concept of knowing or understanding if we don't exist within a state? Your question is to aid a non existent problem in a non existent world that doesn't exist within a state.




Thus making your question illogical as the answer to ur question & ur actual question don't exist within a given state.



^ My attempt to sound smart

 

Welp, not much to say after thats been said.


Back to crying myself to sleep.


TTYL.

 

using the pythagorean theorem i got the answer to be 7

 

if u want my work just ask lol

 

the earth is round because christopher columbus said so idiot lol