How Sailors Could Sail from America to India in a Straight Line

NEW DELHI – As i science site explains, we are often trapped in the mystery of disappearing stars and cosmological crises.
While on the other hand, people on the internet are faced with confusing questions like why flying against the earth’s rotation doesn’t reduce flight time, or why we can’t power trucks with magnets.

This week, it seems the confusion continues regarding straight lines. Last weekend, the Newest in Space Twitter account shared a fairly simple post explaining that the journey from India to America could be done in a straight line.

As reported by IFL Science, even though the line drawn looks clearly straight, many people are not sure.

Keep in mind that representing a 3D world on a 2D map always presents some problems and compromises.

No matter how accurate you try to make it, you’ll always end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or sections of the map cut off altogether.

The map you are probably most familiar with is the map based on the Mercator projection, published by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

This projection uses a cylindrical form, where the globe is placed inside the cylinder and then each point on the earth is mapped to the corresponding point on the cylinder.

Meridians (imaginary vertical lines that cross the earth from the north pole to the south pole) are mapped into equally spaced vertical lines on a map, and latitude lines (imaginary horizontal lines from east to west) are mapped into equally spaced horizontal lines.

The Mercator projection has several advantages, such as making maritime navigation easier because latitude and longitude lines form right angles. However, this projection also has some significant weaknesses.