Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Eratosthenes of Minecraft

I wanted to recreate one of Eratosthenes' groundbreaking experiments in Minecraft - at least, as closely as I could. Minecraft's worlds aren't round, so I couldn't use the info gleaned from a deep well at noon to calculate the circumference of the world. Mostly, I was just curious if the sun in the game was the actual source of light, or just a nice cosmetic feature that accompanied the light of day.

So, taking a page from the history books, I dug a really deep well. Eratosthenes reasoned that if sunlight reached the bottom of a well in one city and did not do so in another city at the same time, the Earth must be round. It was one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

I reasoned that if the bottom of my pit got light before the sun was directly overhead, then the daylight in Minecraft did not come specifically from the sun, but was evenly distributed over the world based on elapsed time.

It was a discovery that had no impact on anything, and a hypothesis that could have been tested in any number of simpler ways. It does seem to confirm that light comes from directly above, regardless of the Blocksun's location. Huzzah, useless information! Now go read about Eratosthenes, he was an intellectual badass.

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