So, How Big Is It?

From: Ask | Date: April 1, 2005| Author: Anonymous | Copyright information

Almost 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece, early scientists thought the shape of the world was-well, there were several ideas. One early thinker believed that Earth was a squat cylinder, like a drum, and that people lived on its disk-shaped top. Another conceived of Earth as a rectangle held up by compressed air. But it wasn't long before the Greeks figured out the world had to be round.

Why? When a ship approached over the horizon, they would see its sail first. Similarly, when people ...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research

Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles from HighBeam Research

'The lush, comfortable world we are used to is going rapidly' In his latest book, the green scientist who dared to cross the Darwinists paints a bleak picture of Earth's future under the ravages of global warming. But, he insists, al is not lost for humanity. By Steve Connor
The Independent on Sunday ; THE IOS INTERVIEW James Lovelock ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST James Lovelock insists that he's an optimist, but not when it comes to the future of our planet. We have passed the point of no return, says the scientist who invented the concept of the Earth as a planetary "super-organism" and who impishly
Q&A: this month, Chris Edwards answers your questions about the Earth's spin, the football World Cup, the body clocks of polar animals and the world's most successful exporters and longest rivers.
Geographical ; Will the Earth ever stop spinning on its axis? D Taylor, Bromley The Earth is gradually slowing down, but it's unlikely ever to stop spinning completely. The slowing of the Earth's rotation causes world time to go out of step with the time as calculated by atomic clocks. Hence, on the last day of
End of the world?(Our Final Hour: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in this Century, On Earth and Beyond)(Book Review)
Issues in Science and Technology ; Our Final Hour: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in this Century, On Earth and Beyond, by Martin Rees. New York: Basic Books, 2003, 228 pp. The lights in my office at the University of Maryland blinked once and then went out. It was 4:11 p.m. on Thursday,
On Earth Day, views from off world
Sunday Gazette-Mail ; The rarest view in humanity - Earth from afar - moves many of the lucky few observers to tears and gives them a new appreciation of that blue marble we all call home. When astronauts return from space, what they talk about isn't the brute force of the rocket launch or the exhilaration of zero
CHOOSE BETWEEN THE LAWS OF THE EARTH AND THE LAWS OF ECONOMICS; ONE DEFINES A WORLD OF COOPERATION, THE OTHER OF COMPETITION.(EDITORIAL)
The News & Record (Piedmont Triad, NC) ; Byline: DONELLA MEADOWS The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies must get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more. The first commandment of the Earth is: Enough. Just
THE EXOTIC WORLD BELOW US COMPUTERIZED IMAGES PROVIDE STARTLING VIEW OF EARTH'S INTERIOR
The Boston Globe ; For millenia, mankind's ideas of what lay within the Earth were little more than flights of fancy: everything from a fiery underworld of tortured souls to a hollow planet populated on the inside. But now, just as spacecraft have shown us other worlds in vivid detail, other technologies are
The slowest waltz: in an edited extract from his book The Earth: an Initimate Portrait, award-winning palaeontologist Richard Fortey explains how the subterranean world has shaped the surface of the Earth and continues to influence our lives today.(Excerpt)
Geographical ; Since the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it has been in a constant state of flux. The movement of tectonic plates conspires to cause the Earth's surface to dilate and collapse, the seas to rise and fall and the continents to move. It has created the continents and oceans that we know
Reviews: Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the True Age of the Earth: The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity: How James Hutton rocked the world
The Scotsman ; Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the True Age of the Earth by Stephen Baxter Weidenfeld & Nicolson, GBP 16.99 The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity by Jack Repcheck Simon & Schuster, GBP 15.99 NOT five minutes' walk from this newspaper office, on
Out-of-this-world pictures yield the secrets of the orange moon Images of Titan, the largest of Saturn's 33 moons, have wiped the disappointment of the Mars mission off the face of the Earth. Steve Bloomfield reports
The Independent on Sunday ; Some of the most astonishing photographs ever to be taken reached Earth yesterday, after travelling nearly a billion miles through space. Taken by a camera which journeyed for more than seven years to reach its target, they are of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and are already beginning to reveal
Earth-like planet may not be out of this world
Oakland Tribune ; Breaking a three-year secret, a team of astronomers said they have discovered the first Earth-sized and possibly Earth-like world in a miniature solar system nearby, just 15 light years away. The planet zings around a tiny red star every two days, close enough to roast the planets surface to an