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And so it remained until the 1800s, when a small but vocal group of Biblical literalists began interpreting Bible passages as meaning that the Earth was literally flat. This was in about 240 BCE, and the experiment was repeated and confirmed by any number of other Greek scientists.Īnd such has been the state of our knowledge ever since, as accepted by virtually all educated people, even throughout the Middle Ages. Through a simple geometric computation, he determined the circumference of the Earth to within 2% of its exact measurement known today. Building upon this foundation of knowledge, Eratosthenes, a geographer and mathematician, measured the difference in the angle at which the sun shone down two different wells about 925 km apart, the locations of which were thoroughly established by multiple surveys. Pythagoras noted this as early as the 6th century BCE, followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and others. The ancient Greeks had no doubts that the Earth was a globe, as virtually any observation or measurement you can make indicates this. The old illustrations we see of turtles bearing the flat Earth are not from ancient cultures, but from Western misinterpretations of allegorical Eastern beliefs, which were then parodied into straw man arguments depicting ancient science as ridiculous. It's from an old joke, repeated over and over again in books since at least the 1800s. Galileo was sent to the inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere: the government had declared it to be as flat as a trencher.Įven the popular meme of "Turtles all the way down", in supposed reference to an ancient belief that the Earth was flat and resting on the back of a giant elephant, which stood on the back of the World Turtle, is not a literal claim. Even Thomas Jefferson was fooled by the myth, wrongly writing in 1784 that: they observed, that the circumference of the earth must be so great as to require at least three years to the voyage. Others, more versed in science, admitted the globular form of the earth. For a few lines later, in the very same paragraph (which is never cited by promoters of the claim), Irving also spoke of the more learned members of the commission: However, Irving knew that this did not, in fact, represent the state of knowledge in the day. extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat. They observed, that in the Psalms, the heavens are said to be extended like a hide. To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of scripture. Irving's narrative included a scene where Columbus had to pitch a royal commission on his voyage an event which Irving had to entirely invent, as the actual minutes of any such meeting were never recorded. This author may have been inspired by Washington Irving, the author of such tales as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, who also wrote a book called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. When Columbus lived, people thought the Earth was flat. A case in point was the 1919 Boys' and Girls' Reader, in which the very first sentence of the very first chapter on history was: It's not clear how or exactly when this myth was born, but examples are easy to find. For it wasn't until the mid-1800s that any sort of an organized flat Earth lobby existed in fact even the very idea that people ever thought the Earth was flat is only a few years older than that.Īn entire mythology has arisen claiming that authorities used to believe the Earth was flat. While that seems quite recent compared to how long the flat Earth theory must have been around, it's actually a large chunk of it.
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It's had a spotty history, having never really been much more than a newsletter mailing list, and it's only been around since 1956. The Flat Earth Society does indeed exist, but its current incarnation is quite a bit different today than what was originally founded. Perhaps of the greatest interest is the question of why certain beliefs were adopted in cases where the observations conflicted with the dogma. We're going to try and sort all this out, to see who actually believes what today, and who actually believed what going back through history. While this is described as an ancient, pre-scientific belief, it's increasingly common today to point out that very few ancient societies who had any meaningful science actually believed the Earth was flat. The Flat Earth Society is well known, and widely assumed to be a group of people who lobby the idea that the Earth is not actually a globe.
#500 nations episode 3 summary series#
Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at a series of beliefs that are said to be about the shape of the Earth.