The Quiz:
"Try to resolve how could you know that earth is a sphere without having seen any space picture. And while considering that your senses can show you only flat surface."
Find a nice cave, and your time starts now. You may win Nobel Prize for it (I rationally think)!
3 did criticisms:
The ancient Greeks solved this question with great ingenuity. Although there were many Greek proponents of spherical earth, Eratosthenes was perhaps the most brilliant in this regard because he also calculated the circumference of the earth. He did by using rules of trignometry, and by comparing the shadows cast by sticks of the same height, located at two different places and measured at the same time of the same day, set at a determinate distance from each other.
Aristotle also believed earth was spherical. Some of the arguments he gave were that travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher above the horizon (something not explained by flat earth hypothesis) and that the shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round.
From "On Heavens"?
Ah I forgot to mention the real heresy. I was arguing that one may come to know a fact (objectively) not by sight, experiment - rather through eye of the heart :)
But... the statement that "your senses can show you only flat surface" is incorrect, unless your senses are dull and barely functioning. IMO.
Discarding the fact that all other objects in the sky that we can see is round so the earth would logically be round too as well as the round shadow of the earth on the moon you still have the curve of the horizon. If you travel over an absolutely flat surface then mountains and such would grow larger as you come closer, but they wouldn't "suddenly" appear as they do on earth because of the curved surface. People thousands of years ago accepted earth as round because of that and I don't need any further proof either. =)
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