物理学史上最美的十个实验第七名.docVIP

物理学史上最美的十个实验第七名 Eratosthenes measurement of the Earths circumference ?埃拉托色尼测量地球圆周长 At noon on the summer solstice in the Egyptian town now called Aswan, the sun hovers straight overhead: objects cast no shadow and sunlight falls directly down a deep well. When he read this fact, Eratosthenes, the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C., realized he had the information he needed to estimate the circumference of the planet. On the same day and time, he measured shadows in Alexandria, finding that the solar rays there had a bit of a slant, deviating from the vertical by about seven degrees. The rest was just geometry. Assuming the earth is spherical, its circumference spans 360 degrees. So if the two cities are seven degrees apart, that would constitute seven-360ths of the full circle — about one-fiftieth. Estimating from travel time that the towns were 5,000 stadia apart, Eratosthenes concluded that the earth must be 50 times that size — 250,000 stadia in girth. Scholars differ over the length of a Greek stadium, so it is impossible to know just how accurate he was. But by some reckonings, he was off by only about 5 percent.古埃及的一个现名为阿斯旺的小镇。在这个小镇上，夏至日正午的阳光悬在头顶：物体没有影子，阳光直接射入深水井中。埃拉托色尼是公元前3世纪亚历山大图书馆馆长，他意识到这一信息可以帮助他估计地球的周长。在以后几年里的同一天、同一时间，他在亚历山大测量了同一地点的物体的影子。发现太阳光线有轻微的倾斜，在垂直方向偏离大约7度角。 剩下的就是几何学问题了。假设地球是球状，那么它的圆周应跨越360度。如果两座城市成7度角，就是7／360的圆周，就是当时5000个希腊运动场的距离。因此地球周长应该是25万个希腊运动场。今天，通过航迹测算，我们知道埃拉托色尼的测量误差仅仅在5％以内。