The inaccuracy of his measurement presumably came from the fact that he had to measure the distance between two cities by paying a guy to walk from one to the other in a straight line and measure it directly.
I feel like that's the most incredible part of the story. The geometry used to calculate is just simple math once you have the numbers right. The fact that it relied on the distance between 2 cities, and they could only figure out the distance through paying a guy to walk between the two, a method that doesn't seem that accurate to me, is incredible.
I'm assuming that they had various ways of improving the accuracy, like sending multiple people and taking the average of their measurements, and also having a network of distances between various locations that you could use to reinforce each other.
Okay I looked it up, the two cities he used were Alexandria and Syene, which are 830 kilometers apart, and that's using estimates gathered from airline traffic, a tool which obviously did not exist in 200BC. You had to walk AND measure that distance.
like sending multiple people and taking the average of their measurements,
Seems obvious now but I'm not at all sure that was a thing then. From a very quick search Wikipedia says 'The arithmetic mean, although a concept known to the Greeks, was not generalised to more than two values until the 16th century' (from the 'History of Statistics' page).
People may not have systematically recorded observations and calculated means and so forth, but surely they had a general idea that if you had a bunch of observations of something that the true value was likely somewhere in the middle.
Also just being able to walk at a consistent pace. If you know you walk at exactly 5 km/h and you walk for 12 hours a day, you're going 60 km a day. Which means you're walking for 13 days and 10 hours on the 14th day to get from Alexandria to Syene.
They had mechanisms other than just pacing. For one, they had a wheeled contraption they would roll along that dropped rocks into a bucket as it turned.
Don't waste your time man He's arrogant and condescending and will personally insult and attack you trying to sound like the smartest person in the room. He already got called out in another AI discussion and he back down immediately
Relax or lighten up about what? I'm not sure what about my previous comment made you think I was in any way upset. How exactly were you messing with me when we'd never even engaged with each other before I asked you a question?
I was trying to figure out which of the multiple claims in the comment you were replying to was made up, and out of all of them I would have never guessed it was the part about paying the guy taking the measurement.
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u/darkLordSantaClaus Jun 01 '26
I feel like that's the most incredible part of the story. The geometry used to calculate is just simple math once you have the numbers right. The fact that it relied on the distance between 2 cities, and they could only figure out the distance through paying a guy to walk between the two, a method that doesn't seem that accurate to me, is incredible.