RE: How Muslims believed earth was spherical long before anybody mentions it.
March 14, 2015 at 4:53 pm
(March 14, 2015 at 4:33 pm)JuliaL Wrote:(March 14, 2015 at 4:15 pm)Smaug Wrote: These are very interesting things you're mentioning. It's a shame but I've never paid attention to ancient Hindu works in astronomy. A casual search on this topic indicates that Hindus knew well about Greek astronomical worls and used them in their own. Speaking of Arabs, your version makes sence since it's known that they had trade connections with India and exchanged knowledge, too. For example Arabic numbers originate from India if I remember correctly.
I just ran across the Indian astronomer connection while looking for a way to counter the really goofy argument of AtlasS2, that Erastothenes didn't recognize a spherical earth and was measuring a circumference of the earth as a circle because nobody reported it as ball shaped (or some such nonsense.)
It shows how ignorant the OP is regarding geometry and trigonometry. Had Eratosthenes thought the Earth was a coin (horizontally placed), he could not have been able to estimate its horizontal circumference according to how he did the calculations.
And nobody in their right mind ever thought the Earth was a vertically-placed coin with us along its circumference. It was too obvious even to the naked ancient eye that it wasn't.