The Earth is not Flat

Speaker: Alan Hunton

Ancient civilisations had little understanding of our planet and the general opinion was that it was flat or saucer shaped. All the heavenly bodies appeared to revolve around the Earth. Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers working in Alexandria in Egypt during the first millennium BC disproved the flat Earth theory and within a short period of time had discovered the size of the Earth and Moon and the distances between them. The influence of Aristotle and Ptolemy and the teachings of the Church stalled any further progress and it was
not until the seventeenth century that Kepler and Galileo could show beyond doubt that the planets went round the Sun using the earliest telescopes as aids.
We will also discover that in the 18 th Century, Nevil Maskelyne found a way of ‘weighing’ the Earth by taking a very large plumb line on a series of rambles in the Scottish Highlands.