Fragment 9.

9. The early Greek philosopher Anaximander, at one point, believed the earth to be cylinder shaped. This is rather an interesting transition between flat and spherical Earth concepts. In a 4 dimensional sense the Earth could, of course, be concieved of as a giant closed cylinder, or torus with the Sun at its centre. However, when this model is scaled back to just 3-dimensions, the issue of night and day–arising from the Earth’s rotation–starts to become a problem. In order to eleviate this problem, it must be assumed that the Sun is a relatively small object–about the size of our moon and at a similar distance– in a helical orbit around the cylindrical Earth. If we further assume this cylinder to stretch infinitely in both directions, then we can imagine an infinite number of these luminous objects in rotation about the central axis of the cylinder. A consequence of this model can more readily be seen in this diagram, where a man leaves his home on one region of the cylinder on 14/5/88 and reaches a foreign land basking in the Sun of the 17/5/88. If we assume that it has taken him three days in which to travel to this land, then we can be assured that this particular Sun will rise in his homeland on the 20/5/88. Just as each day has its own portents and characteristics, which the alchemists of old knew how to distil from the dew collected on the lawns, so might a man procure and distill dew from the same day in different parts of the world leading him to increase his knowledge of future events.