“Just because there are Longitude measurements with North and South in them...”There aren’t. The ones with North and South are measurements of latitude.
Ooops! Good catch, thanks. Here let me fix that:
Just because there are Longitude measurements with theNorth and Southdescriptors "East" and "West" in them, doesn't mean that logically Japan is East of Hawaii.
What most others here are saying, that the answer to the question (which I've dubbed the "trick answer"), is the obviously correct one. OK, I'll stipulate that, based on Lat/Long location names everyone is correct.
And if we throw out the lat/long location name, what do we have left to work with? Is there any other logically consistent argument to be made for Maine as the further east location?
And my gut feel, that I'm working through here is that Yeah, there is.
Because when we use the terms North, East, South and West we primarily use them as directions, not location names.
My example is based on direction, not the descriptors in the lat/long cartesian measurement system.
Start here: what I've never thought about much before is how differently the two axis (axis's? axi?) of direction function. Here's a bunch of differences (I thought this up, there might be better regular terms for these things I'm describing).
| Feature | Latitude | Longitude |
|---|---|---|
| terminus | 2 points | semi-circle |
| terminus to terminus distance | antipode pair, 12,450 miles | Zero (180°E and 180°W are the same) |
| nature of terminus | natural | arbitrary |
| continuous travel in direction | bounded, impossible | unbounded, possible |
| lines of | different lengths | same length |
| degrees total | 180° | 360° |
Using the coordinate system (lat/long descriptions) then furthest East and West, is the line consisting of all the points on the 180° East/ 180° West Longitude.
But if we use Eastthe direction
? Then the answer to "what is the furthest east (or west) one can go is one's current longitude ± 180° and notmerely the distance to the 180th meridian.
Example: From Amatignak Island (the Aleutian with the Western Most Lat/Long coordinates, what point on Earth is furthest East from there. My claim is using East the direction it would be somewhere near 0°, not the island 100 miles to the West.
The "trick" nature of the question is revealed more obviously in this example. |
I doubt I convinced anyone, but I had fun trying, and sometimes that's enough.
Happy New Year!