-
Asked by to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 18 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
-
Anna Middleton answered on 18 Mar 2014:
Hi Julia
It’s just perspective and the fact that we can only see a certain distance. The earth and world are definitely round as you can see this from space.
-
-
Iain Moal answered on 18 Mar 2014:
This is because the earth is so big and we are so close to the ground. Imagine putting your hand on a small ball, like a table tennis ball. Like this, you can curve your hand all the way around the ball. If you use a bigger ball, like a tennis ball, then you can’t curve your hand around as much. If you take a much bigger ball, like a beach ball or zorb ball, then your hand is almost flat. The idea here is that the bigger the ball gets, the flatter it appears compared to the size of your hand. Now, imagine that the ball is absolutely massive, as big as the earth. Now, not only is the surface of the ball basically flat compared to the size of your hand, but it appears flat even compared to the size of everything you can see around you. This is why the earth appears flat, even though it is round.
-
Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:
The world isn’t flat, it just looks that way because it’s so very big compared with how far we can see–imagine that we are standing on a very big ball, so that all we can see is the top part of the ball, which looks flat.
We can only see that the Earth is round when when we go into space, but people figured out that it was round before we could go into space, because of how the positions of the stars in the night sky are different in different parts of the world.
Comments