The World is Round

"...imagine a ball the size of a house. To a fly standing on this giant ball the tiny piece of the circumference it sees would hardly seem to curve. And the part of the ball the fly stands on would be such a tiny portion of the surface that to the fly (even a clever fly) it would seem to be flat."

The earth is so big that, like the fly on the gigantic ball, a person on the earth's surface can never see or feel its roundness. Even from a jet airplane ten miles high, the world still looks flat. How then could earth-bound people discover more than two thousand years ago that the world is round?

Anthony Ravielli's beautiful pictures, accompanied by his lucid text, tell what clues the ancient Greeks found in the heavens and on earth that informed them of the world's true shape. He shows how it happened that this idea did not become commonly accepted until centuries later when one of Magellan's ships had sailed completely around the world. But today, for the first time in history, it is possible for people to see the curve of the earth's surface–for the astronaut to obtain an actual view of the world they live on as a spherical planet moving through space.