Geology and Astronomy by Charles Kovacs

Author:Charles Kovacs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Floris Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

It was rather like when we walk up a hill and on the other side is a village with a high church tower. At first we will only see the top of the tower over the hilltop, then we will see more of the tower, and only when we get to the top will we see the whole village. And the sailors of ancient times, looking at the flat expanse of sea before them, wondered why it was that this flat, calm sea (on a calm day) was like a hill when they approached an island. Yet they knew they were not sailing uphill!

The other puzzling thing was the Pole Star itself. In the Mediterranean, where most of the sailing was done, the Pole Star is not very high over the horizon. If you held one arm horizontally and lifted the other to point at the Pole Star, the angle between your arms would be no more than 35°. But when these sailors from the Mediterranean sailed north, say to the coast of Britain, the Pole Star stood higher in the sky; the angle was 50° or more above the horizon. They knew the Pole Star does not move, but the further north they went the higher the Pole Star stood, and further south it stood lower.

These were the two things which puzzled the Greek sailors: approaching an island over a flat sea the island appeared as if they were walking up a hill; and that the Pole Star stood higher in the north than in the south.

In Alexandria, the great city of learning and knowledge that Alexander the Great had founded in Egypt, there were wise and learned men who found the answer to the sailors’ puzzles. These wise men said that the earth is round, it is a globe.

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