this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Who was your teacher? Aristotle?

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Which is admittedly fairly big.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

...wait, really? I know back then it was probably anyone's guess, but that sounds like one of those oddly specific things that makes the moon being made of cheese sound like a down-to-earth conclusion.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 33 minutes ago) (1 children)

I checked, and it looks like I oversimplified: Anaxagoras estimated that the moon was the size of the Peloponnesus and the sun was somewhat larger—but how much larger depended on how much further away it was, which he had no means of guessing.

His estimate of the moon’s size was derived from observations of a solar eclipse, in which the path of totality was about the size of the Peloponnesus—but he probably missed a lot of places that experienced a partial eclipse and didn’t make note of it.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 2 points 12 hours ago

I mean his train of thought deserves credit, just not for factoring in everything. A good Greek philosopher was like the Sherlock Holmes of their day; I recall reading Aristotle saw the Earth's shadow on the moon and how it curved and he was like "ah, so the Earth isn't flat, it's a ball" (though then he'd go on to say stuff like "other cultures are less prone to revolution, so they must be natural slave cultures", which would be more like Half-Life 3's hypothetical version of Sherlock Holmes).