Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

There Earth isn't spherical, it's spheroidal.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov

Consider reading the article.

Not sure why you've been downvoted, unless it's for pedantry. The Earth is indeed spheroidal, in fact an oblate spheroid - flatter at the poles and bulging at the equator due to the rotation of the earth. Modelling the true shape of the Earth is central to geodesy.

There's a danger in pedantry -- outsiders can mistake it for "see: there's no consensus that the earth is a sphere!". Having said that, the earth is not an oblate spheroid -- it's very slightly pear-shaped, and has all sorts of mountains and valleys.

To paraphrase Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong: "The earth is flat" is a pretty good model. "The earth is a sphere" is much better. And "The earth is an oblate spheroid" is just a bit better than that.

So, let us consider the aim of the essay: to debunk the flat earth claim as many ways as possible. I think they did a pretty good job finding data for which the flat earth model is insufficient, but a spherical earth fits quite nicely.

You'd understand why he was downvoted if you had read the article.

Because the 2nd paragraph of the article uses that exact phrase. Which means that neither of you read the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com