Who first discovered the earth was spherical?
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erathostenes did it by measuring the angle of a shadow from a stick on a certain day, and then doing it again the next year farther south.  He used geometry to figure out the size of the earth, and wasnot correct, but not too far off.
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Plato, I guess. the Question is too vague. Plato's geocentric system was refuted by Copernicus, but the Catholic Church refused to accept Copernicus's findings.
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The earth's shape is not define.But , Aryabhatta tells that the earth is round.
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The earth is APPROXIMATELY round due to gravitational forces.
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I think you want Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer who lived in Alexandria Egypt in the second century.  His books Almagest and Tetrabiblios  were the authoritative works in astronomy  and astrology respectively, for centuries.\n\nHis astronomy placed Earth at the center of the universe, and used a complicated system of circles within circles to explain the motions of the planets. Nevertheless, it wasn't until Kepler (in the early 1600's) figured out that planets orbited the sun in elliptical orbits that anyone had a significantly more accurate way to calculate planetary positions.
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Ptolemy came up with an early model (pre Galileo and pre Copurnicus) that was ingenious, but wrong.  He had the Earth at the center and all the planets (and the sun!) circling around it.
313727
the answer is jupiter.  galileo discovered io, europa, ganymede, and callisto in 1610.
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The sphericity of the earth was known long before Eratosthenes, but he did measure the size of the earth. \n\nEratosthenes had heard tales from travellers that at noon on midsummer's day in Aswan, Egypt, one could see the image of the Sun on the water at the bottom of a deep well. He realized that this could only happen if the Sun was directly vertical on that day at Aswan. He then measured the angle of the Sun from vertical at his home in Alexandria at noon on midsummer's day, and determined (using a compass) that the angle was 1/51 of a full circle. Since he also knew that the distance from Aswan to Alexandria was 5000 stadia (about 500 miles), he computed the circumfrence of the Earth to be 51 * 5000 or 255,000 stadia. This is a remarkably accurate result.
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Nicholas Copernicus: Polish astonomer who lived between 1473-1543. He was born in Torun, Poland to a middle class family. He attended school at Krakaw and eventually moved on to Italy where he received a degree in mathematical science. Before his time, people believed in the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which maintained that the Earth was the center of the universe. Unfortunately, this model was inadequate at predicting the positions of the planets. In 1543, Copernicus started a scientific revolution when he published the heliocentric theory, in which all the planets, including Earth, revolved around the sun. He also introduced a full mathematical system that could accurately calculate the positions of the planets at any given time.\n\nMadame Curie: she and her husband discovered some really cool stuff about atoms. She died of cancer after over-exposure to X-Rays. The dangers of x-rays were not know until many years after x-rays were discovered.\n\nBronislaw Malinowski: anthropologist, one of the founders of cultural anthropology, famous for his research in Trobriand Islands.\n\nRalph Modjeski: engineer, specialized in building bridges (f.e. Thebes Bridge over Mississippi, Delaware River Bridge, Trans-Bay Bridge in San Francisco, Blue Water Bridge in Michigan). He built numerous other bridges across America, from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. \n\nTadeusz Sendzimir: engineer, author of over 50 inventions in mining and metallurgy.
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The Bible does not talk about the Earth being spherical, but it is described as a circle--a circle is flat.  Read some books about the cultures that existed during that period, and you will understand what they believed regarding the cosmos. To them, the sky was a big dome overhead, with all the heavenly bodies embedded in it. This is why there is a story about the moon and sun standing still in the sky--the ancients believed that God could simply move them around at will, for they had no concept at all of the solar system and how it worked. \n\n In Genesis, the earth is created first and then the rest of the sky forms around it. Why? Because, to the ancients, the universe was Earth-centered, not sun-centered. Everything they could see appeared to revolve around the earth, so this is what they believed.  They knew nothing of the age of the earth, or the vastness of the universe, or the idea that the sun was simply one of billions of stars in a galaxy, which in turn was merely one of trillions of other galaxies. The Bible is NOT scientific, it is simply the collected myths, fables, folklore, and hero stories of a primitive people who believed primitive things.
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ok here goes.  the technical scientific name for the shape of the earth which is generally accepted by the scientific community is\n\nOblaite Spheroid \n\nthe earth is not round nor is it flat or pure sphere \n\nit is an oblate spheroid.  however  if you were to either reduce the size of the earth to that of a billiard ball or alternatively increase the size of a billiard ball to that of the earth you would find that even for all its imperfections the earth is actually closer to a perfect sphere than anything man can make. also it would be much Smoother. the planet sized billiard ball would have mountain ranges 100's of times taller than our highest and valleys much lower than our lowest.  \n\nwhy things, i assume you mean cities and such, are not round is that a sphere or spheroid cannot be divided on the surface or otherwise by spheres or circles without intersecting them there would always be some space where the curves pull away from eachother.  you could put a smaller sphere in the empty space but that would only cause the spaces remaining to be smaller and more numerous down to infinity. unless you overlap the spheres /circles but then they arent circles anymore and it would be a waste of space.  \n\nthat all is assuming the world were in fact perfectly smooth which it isn't given things like topography geography and the like. shperes are not the most efficient shapes on earth.  at least not for all applications in fact they can sometimes be the least efficient. \n\nnow some places are and or were circularly built around a central point however usually this was not an economically/ financually/ geophisically  feasable option. again for reasons like coastlines rivers mountains etc.\n\nhope i answered your question withouth boring you to tears\n\nas for the bible saying the earth is flat that isnt true and he needs to read his bible more though he is correct the sun and the rest of the universe does revolve around the earth that at least i believe is biblical though i cant off the top of my head remember exactly where i think not in genesis though\n\nooh and rokon everything in the bible was written by GOD  the bible IS the UNERRANT WORD of GOD
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The first person who proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun was Aristarchus, about 300BC, but his writings have been lost. In 1530 Copernicus published his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun. In 1609 Galileo first used a telescope to view Jupiter's moons. In 1630 Galileo published a document upholding the Copernican system but was forced to recant his beliefs by the inquisition in 1633.
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The ancient greeks knew the earth was round.  They knew it because they watched ships sail off.  Someone with good eyes could see that the ship was going over the horizon, the bottom of the ship dissappeared first.  Also, they knew that an eclipse of the moon showed the shadow of the earth on the moon.  Erastothenes calculated the diameter of the earth in about 200 bc.  He was accurate to about 3%.
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In classical times, educated people pretty much understood that the Earth is a sphere.\n\n"Eratosthenes (276 BC - 194 BC) estimated Earth's circumference around 240 BC. He had heard about a place in Egypt where the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice and used geometry to come up with a circumference of 250,000 stades. This estimate astonishes some modern writers, as it is within 2% of the modern value of the equatorial circumference, 40,075 kilometres. However, the length of a 'stade' is not precisely known; Eratosthenes' figure falls short if we do not use a fairly generous estimate for this length." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth)
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http://www.aquinas-multimedia.com/stjoseph/galileo.html\n\nMy guess was Galileo and I was right.  Here, look.\n\nBut according to a book I have, the greeks noticed it first.  It was Galileo that proposed the theory to the world.
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the person who discovered the cycle of rocks discovered the rock cycle
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ARYABHATA [Aryabhata] , c.476-550, Hindu mathematician and astronomer. He is one of the first known to have used algebra; his writings include rules of arithmetic and of plane and spherical trigonometry, and solutions of quadratic equationsr.