Introduction to Cosmology

There is one interesting fact about Mulen’s attempt to measure the size of the world with his clever sticks. His measurement only works if the sun is a vast, incalculable distance away.

The Ship of Gold

Yet some would say his sticks experiment would work equally well if the world was flat and the sun was exactly what the legend of Aromanthen and his ship of gold says the sun is: namely a ship of gold soaring across the southern sky every day. This is true to some extent, and it would give the height of Aromanthen’s daily voyage. The story of Aromanthen is a nice story and easy for ordinary people to understand. Much better than the uncomfortable truth - that the world is round!

What else teaches us that the world is round?

The Curved Seas

On the Great Salt Sea, calm as it always is, just after dawn, before the heat shimmer has begun, to see a ship rise from below the horizon, is proof indeed that the world is round. With just a little imagination, it is obvious that it has not emerged from some infinite vanishing point. It has arisen from behind an obstacle, namely the curvature of the earth.

The Illusion of the Salt Flats

There are salt flats near the Inner Sea that are so vast that no landscape beyond the flatness can be seen. To stand amongst that vastness and see nothing but dazzling white is something to behold, especially when a thin layer of water lies across the landscape. Without a wrapping of black gauze across their faces, an unwary traveller could find themselves blinded by the glare.

A simple experiment: have a companion walk away with a banner on a long pole. After surprisingly few great paces, the companion will be invisible, but the flag will still show.

The companion will have walked the entire distance across the flats in the same depth of water. What other explanation can there be but for the curvature of the earth and the curvature of its bodies of water with it?

The Effect of Elevation

Finally, there is the effect of going up to high elevations and seeing further around the curvature of the earth than is possible lower down. What could make it more obvious than this? From the highest spires in the north, the curvature of the earth becomes visible with one’s own eye.

The Distant Sun

Mulen’s clever sticks prove more than that the world is round, but that, as has been shown by the above examples, is obvious to any thinking person. Mulen’s calculations assume that the sun is so distant that its light arrives at the same angle on our world no matter where we are on that round world. If that is the case, then the sun being a visible and measurable sphere in the sky must be very large indeed.

Some method to measure either the distance or the size of the sun eludes the many sources in the library at the Winter Place. No one has found a way of doing this.

Straben, who is more interested in geography than trigonometry and who travelled widely, noted that the sun appears the same anywhere you travel in Heris, varying not a fraction in size when measured by its projection. This all supports the distant sun hypothesis.