Round Earth in Chinese history

[Disinfo Agent]

Manchurian Taikonaut is probably the right person to answer this question. In another thread (http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7475&postdays=0&postorder=asc&high light=ptolemy&start=25&) there was a conversation about the historical development of the concept of a round Earth around the world. Do you happen to know when the idea that the Earth was round became accepted in China?

[jfribrg]

I don't know about China, but here (http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=429459&highlight=&#429459) is a more recent thread discussing a round Earth from a European standpoint.

[A Thousand Pardons]

I don't know about China, but here (http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=429459&highlight=&#429459) is a more recent thread discussing a round Earth from a European standpoint.
This thread (http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=134399&#134399) from a couple years ago seems to be the origin of the interest--Disinfo Agent is the poster formerly known as informant--there is a lot of discussion of non-European world views. I'll have to look through the thread again to see where we left off.

[01101001]

History of Astonomy - Ancient China (http://ephemeris.com/history/china.html)

[Under Emperor Wu, around 100 BCE,] Lo-hsia-Hung likened Heaven and Earth to a shell surrounding its yolk. He stated that the Earth's movement caused the seasons; "the Earth moves cconstantly but people do not know it; they are as persons in a closed boat; when it proceeds they do not perceive it."

A yolk is a sphere. When it became accepted, I do not know.

Has the round Earth become 100-percent accepted in European cultures yet? When do we declare an idea accepted enough?

[Sam5]

Here’s some interesting Library of Congress stuff:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/heavens.html

[Manchurian Taikonaut]

I'm not to sure of Chinese history, maybe another poster like yaohua2000 from Tianjin might know something. I remember that old historical scientists knew that the year is 365 ¼ days long, pretty close to the real number the sky is represented much like a planetarium as round or domed, they wrote about and described about 1500 stars in the early stages of Chinese astronomy, and for the past thousand years you can check historical sightings of comets, eclipses of the sun, supernova, and eclipses of the moon, however I don't think the people from China could ever properly explain what they observed, it was perhaps movements in the West that helped put in final explanations, after Galileo's trial, introduction of the telescope and Newton's work did the people world know what was going on, there are many Hoggie/Nancy or Astrology type crackpot theories in some Chinese star books, I suppose its like the Horoscopes and Zodiacs you'll see in newspapers in the West. There was one old rival cosmological theory, which might have come remarkably close to 20th century scientific concepts the Xuanye-Infinite Emptyness of the Cosmosin theory in which space-bodies were believed to be each following their own path in a void of infinite extent. When the Han Dynasty ruled there were thought to be observations of many stars about 200 to AD10 and Halley's Comet in 12BC, the Song dynasty rule was also important, I think after the Ming rule ideas from the West became most important, such as Galileo and Newton started to show the best ways and made the much needed scientific answers to space. I suppose some people can come up with a new idea or theory but will it ever be truly accpeted, take the Curtis - Shapley debate where people siad that our Galaxy the Milky way was the entire Universe and that objects like AndromedaM31 or the WhirlpoolM51 were just nebula or clusters inside our Galaxy, and that was near the beginning of this last century, maybe it shows our understanding of the universe is always growing or changing rapidly over the years.