How to estimate the distance to the sun

[WhiteWalk]

Triangles, its always fucking triangles

[spacex]

Ancient people weren't stupid, they just didn't have the Internet

[brandonrussell]

Every triangle is a love triangle when you love triangles

[pkmnhx_]

But that means you also need to know the distance of the moon, how did they figure that out (i haven’t watched the whole video with this yet so it could be answered there)

[demilung]

Kind reminder that "geometry" had the word "geo" in it for a reason

[mnjrupp]

It wasn’t until the Venus transits of the 17th century that allowed a more accurate distance. It was needed to calculate longitude correctly. A great read is “The day the world discovered the sun”

[AkshatTheProo]

Ancient people: *found distance between earth and sun*

Some people today : Earth is flat

[CatchThesePaws]

Omg that makes so much sense but still blew my mind

[GREGGRCO]

Next, they're making clocks that break down a second to over 16 decimal places. Crazy !

[ProxyAuthenticationRequired]

Those Greeks! They gave us logic, proofs, and showed humanity the importance of lemons and windex. A truly amazing people and culture.

[LgiT_Hax]

Pythagoras is smiling down on us right now

[lego_by_leo]

Fun Fact: You can only determine this by knowing the size of the Earth.

[fackingcopyrights]

you know you watched too many math videos when you can identify terence tao just by hearing his voice

[dalex]

These two visits with Tau were SOOOO GOOD. I finally understood what I was taught
in physical science/trig/physics.

[Riel_Rami]

And yet there are still flat earthers in the modern day when ancient greeks over 2000 years ago knew this stuff

[kaypz]

Oh now it makes sense! I have always wondered about the position of the sun and moon during these phases!

[Neuroszima]

an answer, they didn't - they estimated the angle to be like 87* which was a big understatement, but this was very nice attempt. They did measure earth diameter however with pretty good accuracy

[betaorionis]

Methodologically, this is absolutely correct, BUT, in the real world, there are two serious difficulties for making the measurement without modern instruments:

1) it's very difficult to know at what moment the half Moon is exactly happening

2) the angle Sun-Earth-Moon is very close to 90º (>89.5º), therefore a very tiny error in the measurement of this angle will mean a great error in the calculated distance to the Sun.

But anyway, one thing is clear: given that the angle is close to 90º, it necessarily means that the Sun is much, much further away than the Moon, which is already a very interesting information.

[NemyacX]

That dude needs to relax his pinkie my god

[xCodeMC]

You are one of the top reasons why I love math.