Author: Noah Berman / Source: did you know?
For some utterly baffling reason, the idea that the Earth might not be a sphere, but rather a flattened disc, has made a comeback.
This ridiculous theory seems to be growing in popularity, despite the fact that the sphericity of the world has actually been widely accepted and believed by educated people since it was first theorized in the 6th century BCE, and confirmed a few centuries later.
Let me repeat that: we’ve known the world was round for about 2400 years. That’s pretty much as long as we’ve known anything collectively as a species.
And let me clarify something. When I say “educated people”, I don’t mean to imply that this is an elitist point of view; I simply mean that for a long, long time, the only people who really thought about this sort of thing were people who had the leisure time to read books, do experiments, and generally become schooled, most of whom had either money or moneyed patrons. Everyone else pretty much had their hands full just surviving as long as they could.
“But I thought Christopher Columbus was the man who discovered the Earth was round,” you say.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
Well…actually, no. 1300 years before Christopher Columbus set sail, Ptolemy wrote his treatise Geography, in which he took to be fact the world’s roundness. And in fact, Ptolemy’s Geography was in Columbus’ library – and it was frequently studied across Europe.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
As far as we know, the idea of a spherical earth was originally posited by Pythagoras (570 – c. 495 BC), of the eponymous theorem. It is unclear whether he had evidence or if he proposed a spherical Earth more out of aesthetic symmetry, but his theory soon gathered proof. Either Pythagoras or, perhaps, his students realized that ships do not simply appear, tinily, at the edge of the horizon as they sail towards port. In fact, they seem to emerge from the water, mast first, followed by the lower portions of the vessel. These observations are only possible if the viewer’s field of view is flat, while the sea is rounding down.
Photo Credit: Youtube, Mathias Kp
Pythagoras’ ideas were reconfirmed by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) two centuries later. As he noted in his book On the Heavens:
“Again, our observations of the stars make it evident, not only that the Earth is circular, but also that it is a circle of no great size. For quite a small change of position to south or north causes a manifest alteration of the horizon.”
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