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Letters
Letters
Philosophers Overturn Physics • How To Be Fairly Good • Kant Get Enough • Good Life Hunting • Thoughts Emerge • Spinoza Limerick • Interpreting Socrates • Russell and Khayyam
Philosophers Overturn Physics
Dear Editor: Heiner Thiessen wrote a beautiful and moving tribute to the Greek polymath Eratosthenes in Issue 151. But something puzzles me about the measurements and calculations he made. Eratosthenes must have assumed the Sun to be a vast distance away when he made the bold assumption that its rays run parallel towards the Earth. A Flat Earther would have rejected this assumption. He would have maintained that the Sun was merely thousands, rather than millions, of miles away, and explained the difference in shadow lengths as only what was to be expected when the Sun’s spreading, non-parallel, rays hit the Earth.
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