Years ago when I was back in high school, I earned first place in our Science Fair. I did a very simple experiment showing how flowing water and density was how Gold Panning worked. Since about 6th grade, I have been very interested in math and science. It has been many years now and I can say that my "ride" with science has been fantastic. For that reason, I thought that I would try to share some of the special events with science that have given me so much pleasure for so many years. A big point is that the pleasure did not cost me anything. I did not have to get my parents to go buy some expensive thing made in China to entertain me as kids seem to expect today. I will repeat, it has been a great "ride".
My first science project is for kids older than 10, but some younger may be able to handle it too. The project is a "Challenge" to figure out how large the Earth is. I am making this a "Challenge" because to learn and appreciate science, one has to "discover" science. It can not be simply taught. All science starts with a question and in this case it is, "how big is the Earth?" I you are not curious enough to go and try to find out, you will never get anyplace in science, so this is the first knockout test. The problem today is that so few of our kids can get past the simple knockout tests. That is the basic reason that the number of our kids going into science and technology peaked out back in 1986 and has been going down ever since.
To make this challenge a little more interesting, I am going to limit the tools to just those that man had 1,000 years ago. No modern tools will be allowed. I will let them use one of the small electronic calculators because I know that none of them can do square roots by hand. They can use things like plumb bobs and measuring tapes. These are the same tools that the Egyptians used to build their Pyramids.
It is interesting that the Egyptians did figure out that the Earth was round and the also figured out how big it was. They got the idea when they noticed that the Sun on the same day would shine down to the bottom of a deep water well and would not shine down to the bottom of another one some distance farther North. If the Earth was flat, they knew that the sun should shine to the bottom of both wells on the same day and the Sun did not. Some "curious" Egyptian was not satisfied not knowing the answer to this "challenge" so he went to work figuring out how this could be. He concluded that the Earth was "not" flat and that by finding the distance between the two wells and the angle the the Sun shown, he could determine the curvature and thus the size of the Earth and that is exactly what he did. That was over 4,000 years ago.
Now if you have a similar curiosity, you will be able to determine the size of the Earth with the same tools that he had. That is the challenge. How close can you get?
