NationStates Jolt Archive

500 years ago, everybody "knew" that the earth was flat.

No, they didn't. Belief in a flat earth has been neither common nor widespread in the last few thousand years. Yes, there are some exception, like possibly the Vikings if you take a literal reading of their metaphysics and some renegade early Christian scholars such as Cosmas.

You haven't fallen victim to Washington Irving's old tale about Columbus, have you?

No, they didn't. Belief in a flat earth has been neither common nor widespread in the last few thousand years. Yes, there are some exception, like possibly the Vikings if you take a literal reading of their metaphysics and some renegade early Christian scholars such as Cosmas.

You haven't fallen victim to Washington Irving's old tale about Columbus, have you?
Let's not forget that the ancient greeks calculated the circumference of the earth to within a reasonable margin of error.

Everyone knows that not everyone believed the world was flat. Look at Copernicus, who got his ideas from those who disagreed with Ptolemy. However, he tried not to publish because the Church would have considered it heresy. When he did publish, he was told to renounce his ideas on pain of death. And you know what? He did.

Everyone knows that not everyone believed the world was flat.

Then why is someone saying that everyone did? - that is my question.

Furthermore, I'm pointing out that it was not those that spoke of a spherical planet who were considered eccentric and were in the tiny minority, but those who spoke of a flat world.

Then why is someone saying that everyone did? - that is my question.
Because Deep Kimchi's on occasion mistaken, just like everyone else.

No, they didn't. Belief in a flat earth has been neither common nor widespread in the last few thousand years. Yes, there are some exception, like possibly the Vikings if you take a literal reading of their metaphysics and some renegade early Christian scholars such as Cosmas.

You haven't fallen victim to Washington Irving's old tale about Columbus, have you?

The Sig was from MIB.

Let's not forget that the ancient greeks calculated the circumference of the earth to within a reasonable margin of error.

Said margin of error being somewhat hard to determine due to the confusion as to the exact length of a stade, IIRC. Eratosthenes, diamond geezer.

The Sig was from MIB.

Ah, now that explains it. Pardon my pop cultural blindspots. Still, I wonder what spirit DK intended it to be taken in.

I was taught that the mass majority of people in western europe beleived that the world was flat

While were talking about it any way, anybody heard of the flat earth society... its some group of people that acutally believe that the world IS flat and that its all conspiracy (or something along those lines)

Everyone knows that not everyone believed the world was flat. Look at Copernicus, who got his ideas from those who disagreed with Ptolemy. However, he tried not to publish because the Church would have considered it heresy. When he did publish, he was told to renounce his ideas on pain of death. And you know what? He did.
but therefore was it not the case that the church, before the renaissance, kept the majority of the uneducated populace of europe/christendom in ignorance?

that's what i thought. hence why it was heresy to say otherwise

I was taught that the mass majority of people in western europe beleived that the world was flat
The mass majority of the population of Western Europe didn't give a flying monkey's ass whether the world was flat or spherical.

Let's not forget that the ancient greeks calculated the circumference of the earth to within a reasonable margin of error.
To paraphrase Aristotle* "I know the Earth is a sphere because when one goes to the South, the Constellations change"

*I think that I'm attributing the quote correctly

i think it was aristotle, but I'm not sure, who managed to actually calculate the circumference of the earth and he was only something like 100 km off... pretty amasing i thought

Ah, now that explains it. Pardon my pop cultural blindspots. Still, I wonder what spirit DK intended it to be taken in.

I think that what people claim as absolute fact today may not necessarily be shown to be reality tomorrow.

The world is flat mofos!


But seriously, no one but scholars had time to think about it. They were all too busy farming.

i think it was aristotle, but I'm not sure, who managed to actually calculate the circumference of the earth and he was only something like 100 km off... pretty amasing i thought
And the only reason he was that inaccurate was because the instruments to make the measurement didn't exist at the time. I'd have to say that that's pretty damn impressive.

Said margin of error being somewhat hard to determine due to the confusion as to the exact length of a stade, IIRC. Eratosthenes, diamond geezer.
Fair enough... but calculating the circumference at all required thinking it was round.

No, they didn't. Belief in a flat earth has been neither common nor widespread in the last few thousand years. Yes, there are some exception, like possibly the Vikings if you take a literal reading of their metaphysics and some renegade early Christian scholars such as Cosmas.

You haven't fallen victim to Washington Irving's old tale about Columbus, have you?

No, I borrowed a line from the script for Men In Black. Why don't you call the movie production company, and inform them of this.

No, I borrowed a line from the script for Men In Black. Why don't you call the movie production company, and inform them of this.
Haven't seen it in a while...I'm wrong! Nooo!

Furthermore, I'm pointing out that it was not those that spoke of a spherical planet who were considered eccentric and were in the tiny minority, but those who spoke of a flat world.
Maybe among scholars ,but unless they had zogby polls back then, how exactly can you claim to know what the common populace knew? Which really is the point of the 'everyone' rhetoric. Given that most of the schooling was still done by the church at that point I'm betting that the general consensus was a flat earth.

Given that most of the schooling was still done by the church at that point I'm betting that the general consensus was a flat earth.

The mainstream of thought in the Church was that the Earth was flat, those Christian scholars who claimed otherwise (such as the aforementioned Cosmas) were the tiny minority.

Question: to whom did the Church refer as 'the Authority', and what position did he hold on the matter?

No, I borrowed a line from the script for Men In Black. Why don't you call the movie production company, and inform them of this.


Apologies to you. Pop culture blindspots.

but therefore was it not the case that the church, before the renaissance, kept the majority of the uneducated populace of europe/christendom in ignorance?

that's what i thought. hence why it was heresy to say otherwise

Nope. The church defered in matters of Natural Science to the writings of Aristotle, and he wrote of a spherical planet.

I was taught that the mass majority of people in western europe beleived that the world was flat

Your teachers lied to you. So what's new?

I claim this thread in the name of the Flat Earth Society!

http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm

Begon, mortals!

Heh, Flat Earth Society FTW!

Everyone knows that not everyone believed the world was flat. Look at Copernicus, who got his ideas from those who disagreed with Ptolemy. However, he tried not to publish because the Church would have considered it heresy. When he did publish, he was told to renounce his ideas on pain of death. And you know what? He did.
Where to start?
None of what you said is true.

Copernicus didn't advocate a spherical world. For one thing, he lived from 1473 to 1543 - he was only 19 when Columbus reached the Americas. So the world as a sphere was pretty widely accepted by the time he wrote his definite works on the revolution of the planets.
It was this that angered the Church: He explained that the planets (Earth included) orbited the Sun, not the Church version of the Universe orbiting the Earth.
Even this didn't result in what you think happened.
Copernicus was a canon himself. It was he who feared a backlash from the Church, so only gave his work to a few friends. During the 1530's word began to spread throughout Europe of his ideas and there was growing demand for him to publish. Even the Pope was aware of them but didn't oppose Copernicus' idea of a Heliocentric model.
He eventually agreed to let it be published only when on his death bed.
They became widely read and it wasn't until 1616, 73 years after Copernicus' death, did the Church ban them. This ban was lifted in 1835, by which time everyone had accepted the Heliocentric model.


Who you're probably thinking of is Galileo (1564 - 1642). He would have grown up hearing about Copernicus' theories. He strongly supported the Heliocentric model and using a telescope he made himself quickly added more weight to the notion - specifically discovering 4 of Jupiter's moons, which totally contradicted the Church's stance that everything revolved around the Earth.
It was when he published a treatise extolling Copernicus and ridiculing Ptolemy in 1632 that he incurred the wrath of the Catholic Inquistion. Arrested and threatened with torture, excommunication and possible death, he renounced his views.
Though apparently immediately after renouncing, he turned away from his Church accusers and said, "Nevertheless, it turns!".
He was placed under house arrest and remained there until his death in 1642.

Galileo was a great man. He invented the pendulum clock, improved on the telescope (he made his own based just on a description of one) and showed that objects fell at the same rate with uniform acceleration and showed that a thrown object has two forces acting on it (horizontal and vertical) among other things. This last one proved vital in Sir Isaac Newton's later discoveries on gravity.
Probably most importantly, he rejected many of Aristotelian eplanantions of physics which had been accepted up until that time. Aristotle was a God to science and no-one dared question his explanations. As a result science had been held back for centuries.
Galileo, in doing questioning Aristotlian tradition (remember these were proclamations that had been accepted by everyone for 2000 years) - and then by doing ground-breaking experiments using scientific method (rather than the Aristotle way of just trying to work it out mentally), paved the way for people after him to question everything they had been told and to devise experiments in order to 'prove' their theories.

So not just a man who inspired a Queen song.

Thus endth your history lesson.

I claim this thread in the name of the Flat Earth Society!

http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm

Begon, mortals!

So are we going to fall off the edge or something....

i think it was aristotle, but I'm not sure, who managed to actually calculate the circumference of the earth and he was only something like 100 km off... pretty amasing i thought
That was poor old Erastothenes (rhymes with 'knees').
By all rights, he should have been hailed as one of the greatest.
This was because he was outstanding in pretty much every field, but not the best at any of them. Thus he was often refered to as Beta or Pentathlos, as in "Number two": i.e. The 2nd best at everything.
(Pentathlos was the name given to the an athlete who was not the best in one particular sport but did really well in several)

He was the third librarian of The Great Library in Alexandria.

When told that at midday on the Summer soltice, the sun shone directly down a well in the city of Syene (the well was there specifically for that), he deduced that Syene must therefore lie on what we know as the Tropic of Cancer.
He paid someone to measure the distance between Alexandra and Syene (there were ppl back then that walked according to a set stride length - called a stadia - and so would literally pace out the distances between towns and cities). He then measured the Sun's shadow at Alexandra, midday on the soltice. From that he conlcuded that the distance between the two (using pretty straightforward trigonometry here) was ~1/50th of the circumference of the Earth.

He came to a figure of ~46000km, about 15% greater than the actual figure of ~40000km. Considering the inaccuracies involved:
The length of stride being uniform for all 5000 stadia,
The number of stadia,
The assumption that Syene lay exactly on the Tropic on Cancer (it doesn't),\ The assumption that Syene and Alexandra lay in the same meridian (they don't),
And that the Earth is perfectly speherical (it isn't)
It's a damn fine approximation.

He also estimated the distance from the Earth to the Moon(130 000km) and Earth --> Sun (134 million km). Okay, he wasn't too hot with the Moon measurement ('only' off by 250 000km!), but the Sun one isn't that bad (off by 12%).

He also measured the tilt of the Earth, arriving at a figure of 11/83 of 180°, namely 23° 51' 15".
The actual tilt is 23° 27'. So he was out by less than 2%.

He worked out a calendar that invloved leap years.

He mapped the Nile up to Khartoum, showing the two Ethiopian tributaries. He was the first one to theorise that lakes were the source of the Nile (no-one til then could explain where the Nile came from).

He did a bit of astronomy and made a list of nearly 700 stars.

He also did a lot work with prime numbers and is best remembered for the 'Sieve of Eratosthenes' (look it up if you don't know it).


All this (and more, lots of his stuff has been lost) and he was ridiculed as being 2nd best!

The Greeks could be a pack of bastards in their day.


He went blind in his old age and committed suicide by starvation.

The mass majority of the population of Western Europe didn't give a flying monkey's ass whether the world was flat or spherical.

Most did think it was flat, though.

Most did think it was flat, though.

Evidence for this assertion?

Copernicus didn't advocate a spherical world. For one thing, he lived from 1473 to 1543 - he was only 19 when Columbus reached the Americas. So the world as a sphere was pretty widely accepted by the time he wrote his definite works on the revolution of the planets.

All these sentences are individually true, but taken together could be misleading.

Copernicus would have believed in a spherical world, but there was no need for him to advocate it, as there was no real opposition tot he idea.

The whole Columbus/flat earth malarky is a red herring. The notion that Columbus's sailors feared falling off the edge of the world was a Victorian literary invention, and can be ascribed to Washington Irving. Aside from that, suggesting that Columbus's travels in themselves proved the world was spherical is missing the point: he didn't circumnavigate the globe, nor did he reach the country he though he had landed upon. The real debate around Columbus's time was not whether the Earth was spherical or not, but rather what size it possessed. Columbus believed it to be smaller, others believed it to be larger. Thus Columbus's mistake in believing he had reached the fringes of Asia when he had only reached the Americas.

I was taught that the mass majority of people in western europe beleived that the world was flat

I highly doubt most of europe did much thinking past the village down the road.

While were talking about it any way, anybody heard of the flat earth society... its some group of people that acutally believe that the world IS flat and that its all conspiracy (or something along those lines)
Not anymore. The founders believed that, but they died, leaving only people who treated it as a joke in the group. It is a purely satirical organization these days.