She earned a doctorate in 1998 at Flinders University, with the dissertation Thales: Some Problems in Early Greek Science and Philosophy.
However, although David Sherry finds this theory convincing,[7] it has been disputed by Dirk L. Couprie, who argued against the possibility of making the prediction in this way and provided an alternative theory.
[8] Another of these claims concerns a passage in Aristotle stating that Thales described the Earth as floating on water.
The consensus of scholars is that Thales thought that the world was flat, and floats like a leaf or a raft on a flat ocean, but O'Grady takes the non-standard and disputed position that Thales thought of the Earth as a sphere surrounded by space, with its land masses ("earth", using the same word as Earth in ancient Greek as one does in English) floating on its oceans, and that Thales was misinterpreted by Aristotle.
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