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When and how was it discovered that the sun was in different positions depending upon longitude?

History of Science and Mathematics Asked on September 2, 2021

It seems to me that the ancient Greeks knew that geographic location affected the apparent position of the sun in sky but given the lack of rapid travel or communications or reliable clocks, how was this ever discovered?

I am guessing that travelers might have noticed that their own internal clocks became out of synch with the local time but again, travel was so slow that I assume there really was no "jet lag" — moving at most, aboard a ship which I think would have been the fastest was to move large distances, about 100 miles a day the change in local time from that of the traveler’s origin would have been too slow for any jet lag-like phenomenon.

EDIT: I understand that once it had been concluded that the Earth was round and revolved, an unusually educated person would understand, perhaps, that this implied that the sun would be in a different position in the sky at the same time to people in two far-apart cities.

But I would suggest that very few people could visualize this idea. There was no way to communicate to the person in the distant city — the idea of simultaneity might have been very hard to grasp, again, since time and solar position were so tightly coupled.

There was a very clever (I assert) inventor who devised a time-keeper for court in ancient Greece and he made provisions for the time-keeper to run differently at different times of the year — he did not have, I think, the idea of an hour but rather some equal division of daylight. Abstract time may not have been a thing to the ancients and therefore simultaneity in two distant locations may not have been a thing.

One Answer

This is an immediate logical consequence of sphericity of the Earth. Greek tradition credits sphericity to Pythagoras, but modern historians even doubt that he ever existed. So the question has no exact answer. Those Greek writers on astronomy and geography whose work survived take this fact as evident.

Chinese mathematicians who thought that the Earth is flat (in 2nd century AD) but the distance to the Sun is moderate (comparable with the size of the Earth) also concluded that the time will be different at different places. The only model which would give you the same time at all places is flat Earth and enormous distance to the Sun (so that the Earth size is negligible in comparison with this distance). As far as I know, nobody proposed this model.

Answered by Alexandre Eremenko on September 2, 2021

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