🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸Whoops... there it is...
NormanDunbar@lednabwm Even the ancient Greeks figured out that the Earth was spherical with a couple of sticks and a shadow FFS!
Flat Earthers have nothing to fear but sphere itself.
HairyChris@NormanDunbar @lednabwm And worked out the circumference to well within 10% IIRC!
Oggie@HairyChris @NormanDunbar @lednabwm more precise when they got the second series of measurements in egypt, and got different numbers (which led to them thinking they had screwed up the math or measurements somewhere, they were still pretty certain it had to be a platonic sphere- look, most people now still think earth is a sphere and not a weird deformed egg).
As for the OP, clearly teaching the sand to think was an error.
@Oggie @NormanDunbar @lednabwm To be fair Earth's egg-ness is very slight, so for most practical considerations they were pretty much bang on!
EDIT: But yeah, the universe as perfect geometry idea has caught a few people out...
@HairyChris @NormanDunbar @lednabwm
Well, while the overall oval-ness is not incredibly apparent, the local variation is incredibly high- and even coming up with great ways to quantify it is problematic (sea level isn't sea level everywhere! Gravity has a significant delta to the 4th significant digit on incredibly small scales!). We (today) don't really spend a lot of time on this problem but there will be major variations in most measurements.
Also, all orbits are euclidean straight lines!
@Oggie @NormanDunbar @lednabwm I don't disagree! Pretty much every point of measurement is arbitrary/averaged when you get down to it.
@HairyChris @NormanDunbar @lednabwm
God, imagine my face when I learned 'the gram' is literally a little weight we keep somewhere. Just..ah.
I wasn't being snarky about orbits- it actually helps (me, at least) to realize they are perfectly straight, and it's the universe that warps ('line is right, reality is wrong'), so that's what a straight line looks like when you stretch the fabric of space/time.
We're all working off best guesses and approximations here, not a lot of constants (c, e)