Topic summary
Rotation of the Earth
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Earth's rotation.
History
In 499 CE, the Indian astronomerAryabhata suggested that the spherical Earth rotates about its axis daily and that the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotation of the Earth. He provided the following analogy: "Just as a man in a boat going in one direction sees the stationary things on the bank as moving in the opposite direction, in the same way to a man at Lanka the fixed stars appear to be going westward."