Re: The 3-D nature of the flow?

At 06:45 PM 7/10/97 -0600, you wrote:
>
>
>On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Bryce Perry wrote:
>
>> ---Jonathan Stevenson  wrote:
>>
>> Why do you think that European sailors had this view?  The Romans
>> didn't...why should their descendants?  Have you ever seen a statue of
>> Atlas holding a pancake?  I didn't think so.
>
>Sorry, but Jonathan is right here.  That is why Colombus' idea was so
>revolutionary.  Get to India by sailing West instead of South and around
>Africa?  The only problem was that Colombus underestimated the diameter
>of the earth by a couple of thousand miles.  oops.
>
>The Greeks and Romans did believe the world to be flat.  The Romans also
>believed themselves to be the masters of the world because they did not
>believe there were any other major land masses out there.  They did
>colonize many islands, such as the canary islands.  But those statues of
>Atlas you are refering to are MODERN statues of Atlas.  They are modern
>depictions of the ancient myth.  Many old statues of Atlas show him
>holding a bowl.  This is how many ancient philosophers viewed the earth.
>A big bowl with water and land inside of it.  Although some revolutionary
>scholars concluded that the world was round before Colombus' time,
>generally accepted knowledge held a flat-world view.
>
Actually, the Greeks knew the Earth to be round in part becuase of the
altitude
of the sun at different latitudes was different, and in part because the
Earth,
in an eclipse, cast a round shadow on the Moon. They used the first fact to
figure out the diameter of the Earth to 10% of the currently accepted value.
Columbus was revolutionary because he believed the Earth to be 8000 miles
around
instead of 24000. He, of course, was wrong, and if there was not the Americas,
he and his crew would have starved to death trying to cross 10000(?) miles of
ocean.
David Starner - deos@????.net
Nullius in Verba