3 ms·
The Sun–Earth distance is 93 million miles. The ancient Greeks could not even estimate this value.
by db48x 4y ago
The Sun–Earth distance is 93 million miles. The ancient Greeks could not even estimate this value.
- Someone 4y agoI don’t think every teenager knows that. It wouldn’t even surprise me if Posidonious’ estimate of about half the real distance were better than what you would get by averaging the responses from a representative sample of teenagers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posidonius#Astronomy_and_Meteorology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posidonius#Astronomy_and_Meteo...)
- eimrine 4y ago> > The Sun–Earth distance is 93 million miles. > I don’t think every teenager knows that. Teenage respondents have a good chance of remembering that it takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth.
- beardyw 4y agoBut do they know the speed of light?
- db48x 4y agoI think that is another candidate for a fact easily remembered by the average teenager. Top five at least, and not known to the ancient Greeks.
- Someone 4y agoThat’s a lot likelier, yes. I may be pessimistic, but I think that still wouldn’t help them answer “How far is the sun from earth?” because I doubt your average teenager can compute “8 minutes times 300,000 km/s in km”, let alone “8 minutes times 186,300 miles/s in miles”. Their phone can, but their phone also can answer “How far is the sun from earth?” directly.
- db48x 4y agoThe computation is irrelevant. “Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth” is a true fact known to teenagers which was not known to the ancient Greeks.
- db48x 4y agoYou’re right that I should be a little more precise, and state that their estimates were very, very bad and that the limitations were due primarily to the crudity of their instruments (no telescopes yet). But I think that amongst the astronomical facts taught to children it will be the most easily remembered. Well, perhaps the number of planets will be more easily remembered, but that has varied over time and the ancient Greeks had as good a number for that as we do.
- Someone 4y agoMy comment was way less on what the Greeks knew than on what I think “every teenager” knows. In my reading of the question, the bar is a lot higher than “most easily remembered”, even loosening (as we should; there’s basically nothing that truly _every_ teenager knows) “every teenager knows” to “a majority of teenagers know” I can’t find a specific paper on teenager’s knowledge, but if you Google a bit, you get hits such as https://koreascience.kr/article/JAKO201008863879014 https://koreascience.kr/article/JAKO201008863879014, which says “Some teachers thought that the distance to Neptune is farther than the distance from Earth to the nearest star”. Those are elementary school teachers that may not be university schooled, but I would guess they education-wise score in the upper half of the population. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247914140_The_initial_knowledge_state_of_high_school_astronomy_students https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247914140_The_initi... also is revealing about what teenagers know, but focuses a bit more on understanding.
- eimrine 4y agowrong, they figured this up using trigonometry having 10x mistake as an outcome from inability to measure disc of Sun in angular units with enough precision.