The Shape of the Earth — A Very Round Story скачать в хорошем качестве

The Shape of the Earth — A Very Round Story

It’s common knowledge that the Earth is a sphere. It’s as round as a football — in fact, even rounder. Of course, there’s a group of people who insist the Earth is not a ball but is as flat as a pizza. They’re called flat-earthers (I was going to say buttheads), and they aren’t worth even being mentioned. Arguing with them in the 21st century is a waste of time, when everything around us is global — except, apparently, their Earth. It’s curious that the fact of the Earth’s roundness was practically proved 24 centuries ago by Eratosthenes, who even calculated the Earth’s circumference by measuring the angle of the sun’s rays in two Egyptian cities (Syene and Alexandria). His calculation was astonishingly close to the modern value. No modern technologies, no GPS, no space travel. He is 2400 years older than all those flat-earthers — and still they are 2400 times thicker than him. So screw those unbelievable non-believers. However, there is another group of rather learned people who claim that the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, but an oblate spheroid — slightly flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. And this time, unlike the pizza theorists, they actually have science on their side. But the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid is practically impossible to notice with the naked eye, because the difference between the equatorial and polar diameters is only about 43 kilometers — less than 1% of Earth’s total size. To us, it still looks perfectly round. Here you see the Earth flattened at the poles, and next to it, the Earth flattened at the equator by the same one percent. Did you notice the difference? Exactly! That’s why this fact really only matters to people working in global positioning systems. As for the rest of us — we can globally not care. And then comes another group of science people who fanatically claim that our Earth is not a sphere but a well-pronounced geoid. What the heck is that? Well, according to them, the Earth isn’t smooth enough to be a sphere. It has mountains, oceans, the Mariana Trench, and the Grand Canyon. In other words, a geoid is just a fancy name for “Earth with all its bumps and dents.” It’s like saying your football isn’t really round because it has grass stains and scratches after the game. True, technically it’s not perfectly smooth, but come on — it’s still a ball. And now, attention please. The height differences on Earth — from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — amount to about 20 kilometers in total. That’s it! Just 20 kilometers compared to the Earth’s diameter of more than 12,700 kilometers. In other words, the roughness of our planet is like a tiny scratch on a billiard ball. And when someone shows you those “photos” of the Earth without its oceans and atmosphere, and it looks like an apple that’s been aggressively chewed on — just send them straight to the flat-earthers with my best regards. And in conclusion, don’t believe the malicious tongues that say our Earth is just a squashed and battered piece of cosmic rock. The Earth is a beautiful sphere — and for us, it is smooth and perfect. #FunFacts #flatearth #roundearth #science #sciencestories #englishstories