It is pretty interesting how smart we were in the past, but things happened and we slid back some. It is interesting what would it be like if we moved forward only.
Another alternate history idea - recently someone hypothesized that CHINA could very well have started the industrial revolution. They were in line with Britain at the time, using coal for fuel and the like and the technology levels were similar. (Remember through parts of their history, China was probably the most advanced civilization on earth.) Anyway, China’s coal could be harvest dry, where as British coal was usually with water and they used simple steam engines to pump the water out. That little NEED to create these small engines is what drove their development, And once they got them working, people starting thinking of all sorts of uses for them. Right place, right time. If China had been first, maybe this world would look more like the world of Firefly.
OH, also you can easily see the curve of the earth if you have a very large lake. Send a boat out with a flag on it at 10 feet or so. At some point that boat will dip below the horizon, but the flag will be there. And then eventually even that will be gone.
It is AMAZING some of the idiots who think the earth is flat.
You’re only use observation and junior high trigonometry to measure these distances. Not calculus, not radar, nothing more than a table and some arithmetic. So certainly not advanced mathematics.
To imply anti-black racism to pyramid construction conspiracy theorists is bizzarely ahistorical when it comes to the situation of of Egypt in European history and culture (e.g. Jews built the pyramids. Freemasons built a the pyramids and The Great Jewish Temple. The ancient connections between Mediterranean cultures. The fetishization of all thing Egyptians and esoteric and exotic.). To go further and imply that Ancient Egypt was primarily a black society is also ahistorical. Yes there were blacks in Ancient Egypt and even black phararos, it was a multiethnic society like many large ancient societies. To assert otherwise is to embrace a fringe conspiracy theory cut from the same cloth you’re up in arms about.
Finally, the Rennisance wasn’t a reaction against the ancient cultures, as much as it was an embracing of the ancient philosophies and a rejection of the dogma of state religion, and later monarchies. Have you completely forgotten the Dark Ages?
I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You do it at noon! The well is only only illuminated st noon. The math doesn’t work if you do it at any other time because the sun is at an angle, and finding solar noon was probably known for thousand years before the ancient Greeks.
Funny, I don’t see the word “black” in my post at all. It seems to me there are some people out there capable of assuming all Africans are primitive, regardless of skin tone. In fact, I’m willing to bet some people will extend that to everybody except post-Enlightment Europeans. And I had no idea there were black Pharaohs, that’s really interesting.
As for the Renaissance, you’re actually agreeing with me. You read it wrong.
No measurement at the well is required, as the sun shines directly into it on the summer solstice, thus its shadow was known to be zero on that day at noon.
All that was required was to make the measurement 500 miles away on the same day at noon, and use that shadow length in the calculation.
Yes. We cheated a bit by using a cheap map to estimate distance travelled in the north-south direction, where we could have used a compass and the car odometer if we were ambitious and alert the whole way. With the assumption that the earth is spherical:
You may need to, because “the Dark Ages” is a perspective that has been outdated for more than a century.
It’s misleading to cast the Renaissance as a rejection of state religion and monarchy - it was a movement started by devout Catholics in a geographical area that was notable even in its time for not having a state or a monarchy. It was an Italian-born longing for the old days of a culturally great Rome and an attempt to revive it through the very same documents they thought began it in the first place; which is, coincidentally, why the scholars of the time dated the period of cultural, social, moral, and intellectual decay they called “the Dark Ages” from the Fall of Rome to when they started trying to revive Roman culture - a culture, incidentally, with a hereditary autocratic leader and one which basically founded state religion in the West.
I’m planning to go visit egypt in 2027 for the total eclipse and maybe take in the island of elephantine where the well that eratosthenes used to figure out midday time
and maybe get some pictures
