But as far back as Ptolemy, in the 2nd Century Roman empire, cartographers have known that drawing an accurate map of the world is basically impossible.
"From rush to splinter, to a shellful of fish oil, to candle, to paraffin and eventually to electricity, keeping the light burning has been part of the husbandry of the islander".As far back as 261BC, Ptolemy I started building the Pharos of Alexandria, standing over 400 feet tall with an open bonfire that could be seen 29 nautical miles away.
In the 3rd century BC Ptolemy stole every available scroll from passing travellers and ships to stock his great library in Alexandria.
In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth.
The most spectacular single piece is a 23-tonne granite statue of Ptolemy II Philadelphius, a forebear of Cleopatra.
But there is strangely little discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of Copernicus's system of the world, and of the meticulous observations that eventually convinced him that Ptolemy was wrong.
(These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD .A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense.
Put Dr Shanks's and Dr Vauclair's observations together, and one cannot help but wonder whether Ptolemy might soon have some company in the annals of convoluted, discarded theories.
The library's sister college, the Museion or House of the Muses, hosted such illuminati as Euclid, the father of geometry; Claudius Ptolemy and Galen, respectively an astronomer and a physician, and Plotinus and Philo, who were both philosophers.The first library was probably destroyed in 48BC by Julius Caesar, who set fire to part of the city during a revolt against his ally Cleopatra.
Ptolemy's geocentric theory was rejected in the Copernican revolution, not retained in the form "approximately Ptolemy".
