Is it due to the gravitational pull or is it due to the size compared to us living on the surface? If it is size, then would a germ on a basketball think its on a flat suface?
2006-08-28 03:43:31 · 15 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Earth Sciences & Geology
I don't believe the earth is flat but we all 'feel" that we are on a flat surface. Why is the question here. There are many ways to prove the earth is round, 2 that are simplest are: 1.The view of any oncoming land be sea. You observe the mountain peeks prior to the base and 2. that the sun and moon rise from one side and descend to the other. These were 2 of the basic principles Columbus followed. By the way, Dr. M, he also followed the bible in his quest to prove the earth was round.
2006-08-28 04:25:23 · update #1
We see faltness because the curvature is too small relatively to pick out instantly. It takes reason to determine that the earth is round, or not flat. I think if the earth were flat there would be a much deeper horizon. Actually the earth is neither round nor flat but 'crumpled and spherical'.
A bacterium on a basketball...wouldn't percieve at all, but if it could it would *see* a 'flat' surface.
I htink that the Earth's centre of gravity (always pointing to the centre) hindered the realization of a "round Earth" - things didn't accelerate away round + down the curve.
The early church *may* have believed in a flat Earth, but I don't think it said so in the bible, or the koran. "By the time of Pliny the Elder (1st century) at the latest, however, the Earth's spherical shape was generally acknowledged among the learned in the western world." + "The modern misconception that people of the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat first entered the popular imagination in the nineteenth century." Wikipedia.
2006-08-28 08:03:19 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
Yes, a germ-sized sentient being living on a basketball would think it was on a flat surface, as we do on the earth. But, like us, it might see a shadow of the ball and conclude as we have that the ball was a sphere.
2006-08-28 11:16:29 · answer #2 · answered by Grey Bear 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
A tiny arc segment on a large circle approximates a straight line. Yes, the germ on a basketball would considers its surface to be flat.
The circumference of the Earth is about 40,080,000 m
A human is approximately 1.7 m
The ratio is 1.7/(40,080,000 )
= 0.000000042415
The circumference of a basketball is 0.746991648 m
The size of a germ (bacteria) is 1000 nm
The ratio is .746991648/(1000 x 10^-9)
= 0.000000746991648
So, yes, it is roughly the same but for the human, the effect is 10X smaller than the germ to the basket ball.
2006-08-28 11:03:01 · answer #3 · answered by ideaquest 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
I would say simply because of visual perception. The horizon appears to go straight out, rather than curve downward. If you were several thousand feet tall you might think otherwise. Were the gem you speak of to be an inch tall, it would of course see a round ball underneath it, but were it a fraction of a milimeter in diameter, it would probably estimate that the world was flat.
2006-08-28 11:41:12 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
the simplest answer is because the world IS flat... but we know that isn't the case is it. so we have to come up with an alternate explanation. one second... there, had to reserve my answer space so that i wouldn't be eighty days down on the answer list.
okay, take a circle that is one meter in circumference. lets make our line segment that we're going to call "perception" or "p" one meter long. if we wrap our one meter long line around the circle formed, our perception is a complete circle. now, double the circumference of that circle. this time when we wrap P around the circle, what we have in our perception is only half a circle... it's only half as curved as before. lets double the circumference of the circle again. now our one meter line P is only wrapped ONE QUARTER of the way around the now four meter circumference circle. the string is a quarter of a circle and appears only one fourth as curved as (or four times straighter than) the original.
now lets take a gigantic leap. lets say we now have a circle who's circumference is one thousand meters. our perception line is only one meter. that means our line of perception is one THOUSANDTH of a circle. if we know that every time we doubled the size of the circle the line got twice as flat, now we have a fairly flat line. that is why the earth appears flat. your perception is small compared to the earth, and so it only accounts for a small fraction of the sphere of earth. this small fraction means that the surface you perceive actually contains very little curve to it.
consequently, as you expand the circle to infinite in the thought experiment i gave you, the line of perception, no matter what its size, becomes a straight line.
2006-08-28 10:54:03 · answer #5 · answered by promethius9594 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
We preceive the Earth as being flat because the Earth is flat.
2006-08-28 16:46:30 · answer #6 · answered by Amphibolite 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Judging from the responses, it leads me to think that no surface is entirely flat, nor is any line perfectly straight.
2006-08-28 12:10:22 · answer #7 · answered by FourHead 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
germs on a baseball. I believe if you look straight out to sea with no obstructions, you can see a maximum of 2.71 miles before the curve disappears from your view
2006-08-28 10:54:03 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
We don't perceive the curve of the earth because of it's size related to us. Indeed we humans are germs on a baseball.
2006-08-28 10:48:32 · answer #9 · answered by Shona L 5 · 3⤊ 0⤋
because the earth's surface is curved and one can only see so far into the horizon
2006-08-28 23:04:41 · answer #10 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋