Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, the first person to go on a spacewalk, described his experience as: “The Earth was absolutely round. The easiest way seems to be to go up into Space and have a good look. So …how to prove that our planet is spherical One more century passed before someone measured how big the sphere was! Eratosthenes, another genius Greek, quite accurately measured the circumference of the Earth using only simple geometry.Įventually Sir Isaac Newton figured out that the Earth was not a perfect sphere, but a slightly squashed one! This shape is now called an oblate spheroid. Over a hundred years later, another Greek scientist, Aristotle, finally provided us with the observational proof that the Earth had a spherical shape! You can read the translation of his original text here. Pythagoras, the famous Greek polymath, usually gets credits for the discovery of the spherical shape of the Earth, though it is likely that the idea was known for some time before him. Now it is impossible to tell who was the first to point it out. Gradually the Flat Earth view gave way to the Spherical Earth. Chinese believed the Earth was flat and square and was surrounded by heavens. We know the myths of the platter-shaped Earth floating in the ocean or being held by the elephants standing on the turtle. The early cultures all seemed to share the Flat Earth belief.

Who was the first to notice that the Earth was round And the spherical shape of the Earth was one of the first mysteries that the humankind have cracked. It took a long time, years of observations and lots of groundbreaking ideas to give us the modern view of the Universe. When we look around, all we see is the flat ground, stationary Earth with the Sun and the planets circling around it. The problem is, from where we live we get a very distorted picture of the World.

After all, we might be totally wrong about the whole order of things in the Universe.

This is the way to nurture a scientific mind. We don’t want the children to simply accept and memorize scientific concepts, we want them to doubt them, we want them to ask for the proof. But I believe that we, as educators, should feel happy when our learners air their doubts and ask “why” questions about fundamental facts. Many feel a bit silly asking this question since the fact that our planet is round was one of the first things we all learned at school. What is one of the most popular questions that our mobile planetarium visitors ask us after the show? “How do we know that the Earth is not flat?“

Is the earth round or flat'