The Greeks were a civilization that have been admired and studied by historians for over hundreds of years before their tragic collapse. An extraordinary individual named Eratosthenes was born in a small Greek colony called Cyrene, he was a very talented Grecian who has a young man traveled to Athens to pursue studies. In all my years of reading about the ancient Greeks and studying geography, the name “Eratosthenes” had always come up. Taking AP Human Geography last year, my teacher was captivated by Eratosthenes and he would continuously state facts about him. But a unique statement struck me and could never leave my head. When talking about the earths tilt, latitude, and longitude he told us that someone over 2250 years ago, with only basic …show more content…
(between June 20th and June 22nd) the Greek Astronomer, Eratosthenes had heard of a famous well in a Egyptian City called Syene (now known as Aswan) located around the Nile River. He knew that every year on the solstice, there was no shadow on the bottom of well but instead the rays of sunlight reflected back, and not on the sides of the well as on other days. He came to a conclusion that the sun was directly overhead in Syene at noon every year. He knew that in his hometown Alexindra, the sun was never directly above him even on the solstice. He assembled a pole in Alexindra to study and calculate the shadows position eventually proving that no sun was directly above but faintly south. Knowing that the earth was curved and knowing the distance between the two cities, Syene and Alexandra he calculated the planets circumference by doing simple geometry. “Eratosthenes could measure the angle of the Sun’s rays off the vertical by dividing the length of the leg opposite the angle (the length of the shadow) by the leg adjacent to the angle (the height of the pole). This gave him an angle of 7.12 degrees. He knew that the circumference of Earth constituted a circle of 360 degrees, so 7.12 (or 7.2, to divide 360 evenly by 50) degrees would be about one-fiftieth of the circumference. He also knew the approximate distance between Alexandria and Syene, so he could set up this …show more content…
The length of those so called stadions were the length of an athletic stadium, but unfortunately not all of them were built the same size or had the equal length. In Greek the usual stadion was roughly 185 meters (607 feet) and the Egyptians stadion was around 157.5 meters (517 feet). As of today historians and mathematicians still argue on which version Eratosthenes used. If he had used the Greeks measurement, his calculations would have been off by 16 percent! If he had used the Egyptian one, his mathematical skills would have been of by less than 2 percent of earths actual circumference which is 24,860 miles (40,008
Geography and history are different ways of looking at the world, but they are so closely related that neither one can afford to neglect the other. Moreover, each of them offers not just one perspective upon the world, but also multiple perspectives upon the characters of people, places and
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, historically also known as Hellas, is a country in southeastern Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2015. Athens is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. Greece consists of nine geographic regions: Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete, and the Ionian Islands. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea
uses warm tone shades that are appealing/attractive to the eye and distinctive from one another.
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Quote: “We were first introduced to rap music during one of our visits to Mobimbi, a quarter where the foreigners who worked for the same American company as my father lived” (Beah 6).
They were able to compute the length of the Earth's revolution around the Sun, and were able to also predict lunar and eclipse cycles. What is more, their sites also bear the claims of what happened nearly 400,000,000 years before their civilization came into existence. They were able to do this by involving a simple mathematical system that was flexible in counting in twenty year periods. This was all done without the help of the technological instruments that are available to us today. The feat while remarkable is not enough to make the case
Jacob Holleran Mr. Corso Astronomy Period 5 1/15/18 CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) was an influential Greco-Roman astronomer who made important contributions to the sciences in his lifetime during the first century. He contributed to the studies of astronomy, cartography, and optics. Ptolemy developed the eventually disproven Geocentric theory, which falsely claimed that the earth was the center of the solar system, and that the other planets and the sun orbited around it. Regardless, his scientific contributions were influential for centuries to come, and formed the basis for the astronomy of the middle ages. He is regarded as one of the most influential scientist in history.
Many ancient civilizations had their own beliefs about the stars and the universe. Some examples of these intelligent civilizations were the Ancient Babylonians, Middle Eastern civilizations, Central American civilizations, Ancient Chinese, and the Ancient Greeks. The Ancient Babylonians studied patterns on Venus which were later continued by Galileo and Copernicus. People from the Middle East, Central America, and China watched the skies and made many observations and predictions of movement in the heavens. There were many famous Philosophers and Astronomers from the Ancient Greek civilizations who studied the sky. They searched for patterns and numbers to find something fundamental. Thinkers attempted to come up with combinations of uniform circular motions that would prove their already observed irregular motions. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who thought that the moon, sun, and other planets rotated around the stationary Earth. But, as we know today, his theory was incorrect. Some other Greek philosophers attempted to measure the distance to the moon and even tried to find the size of the universe! They found the universe to be finite. On the other and, Claudius Ptolemy believed that the heavens (skies) were not made of rocks, metal, or other Earthy materials, but that they were made of
About two centuries after Aristotle, Hipparchus showed that the model better predicted the motion of the heavens if the Earth was placed slightly off the centre of rotation of the celestial spheres. Apollonius also proposed that the planets changed their speed through the heavens and sometimes stopped and travelled backwards.
In 1543 Nicholas Copernicus, a Polish Canon, published “On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs”. The popular view is that Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves
The intended readers of this piece would be historians and scientist. Many historians would be interested in reading this piece due to the fact that it gives many facts about what Eratosthenes did in his time. Not only was he a scientist but he was also historian himself. The scientist that read this will be intrigued by how he came to the conclusion on the circumference and the angle differences in the two cities.
A century after Aristotle, around 250BC, another Greek mathematician and philosopher named Eratosthenes made his claim to fame with a new alleged proof of a spherical Earth. Eratosthenes noted that at noon, during the summer solstice at Syene, the sun cast no shadows and the rays could reach straight to the bottom of his well, yet meanwhile in Alexandria, a vertically standing metal rod cast a significant shadow, by factoring the length of the shadow with his assumed distance to the sun, Eratosthenes recorded a measurement of Earth’s circumference close to what heliocentrist astronomers use today. The fact of the matter is Eratosthenes’ calculations were made assuming the sun to be millions of kilometers away so that its rays would fall perfectly
The Greeks make significant advances in the fields of both astronomy and astrology. In astronomy their analytical approach to the heavens leads to early insights of great brilliance, even though they eventually blind European astronomers for more than a millennium with the elaborately observed but entirely false Ptolemaic system.
Around 190 B.C, Greek thoughts were dominated by Aristotelian cosmology. However, when the Greek mathematician and astronomer Hipparchus calculated the heliocentric system, it contradicted Aristotle’s idea of the orbits were perfectly circular. Hipparchus abandoned his work because Aristotle's cosmological was believed to be mandatory by the science of the time, even though, Aristotle's model was questioned by certain observations such as changes in the brightness of the planets. Nonetheless, this did not stop Hipparchus’s curiosity in Astronomy. Using the Chaldean and Babylonian astronomical knowledge and techniques, many of his discoveries were widely accepted and proven to be right. Not only did he contribute to Greek Astronomy, he is
Kokino, Republic of Macedonia - This exceptional prehistoric site with precise astronomical alignment was discovered on a mountain top at 1013 meters (3323 feet) height, right upon a plate made of neo-volcanic rocks. Facing towards the east horizon, there are four impressive carved stone thrones dominating over the terrain. Beside the thrones, there are seven markers shaped in the rocks nearby. These markers indicate the rising positions of the sun on the summer and winter solstices, and on the