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We had a speaker on our campus a few years ago, I am embarrassed t=
o admit, who was the president of the Flat Earth Society. (He died r=
ecently, by the way. His name was Charles Johnson.) He was invited =
to campus by the science student senator as the main speaker for scie=
nce emphasis week. Needless to say, the faculty were not happy. But=
, that said, I must add that this experience has provided endless opp=
ortunity for those of us who teach gen ed physics, astronomy, and I s=
uppose other subjects, to discuss the importance of knowing some basi=
c facts about the world they live in and how easy it is to prove, or =
verify, some of those basic facts, so you're not persuaded by bogus a=
rguments like those of the Flat Earth Society. (Or the recent FOX 'm=
oon landing hoax' TV show !)
I happened to be =
in Tucson, AZ, and one evening was looking at the stars, finding what=
was familiar. I found Polaris, the pole star, and using the only an=
gle measuring instrument at hand, my hand, I estimated the angle from=
the north point on the horizon up to Polaris to be a little over 1-1=
/2 hand spans. (The hand span at arms length is about 20 degrees for=
most people. Mine is just slightly over that.) When I got back to=
my home in Roy, Utah (near Ogden) the next night, I did the experime=
nt again and found that Polaris was just over two hand spans above th=
e horizon. The difference in latitude between Tucson, AZ, and Roy, U=
T, was thus a little under 10 degrees, by my crude measurement. Now,=
such an observation proves that the earth is round. To estimate the=
circumerence, the details, I had to get the north-south distance bet=
ween the two cities from an atlas (and yields something over 20,000 m=
iles, not bad for such a crude measurement). But, the fact of differ=
ent elevation angles for Polaris between those two cities proves that=
we live on a curved planet.