The Flat Earth Myth Revisited

(First blog post — but rather than some hello world thought I’d at least post some content — so here’s this is an oldie recycled and edited)

When I was a kid, I was lent a book about the paranormal. Being a naive kid, I read with interest. One of the “amazing” things mentioned was a cave painting found in Armenia which depicted a circle and four stick figures: one standing upright, the other upside down on the bottom of the circle, one on the left etc. It was completely “obvious” what this meant – these ancient peoples knew that the earth was spherical! The author said the only plausible explanation for this is — they were told this by aliens since this is a fact that’s deluded the entire world until very recently.

The myth of the flat earth has only been around for about 150 years or so, and it seems to just refuse to die its death. This myth goes something like this. Until very recently, the whole world believed the world was flat. And not only “commoners” but scientists and ESPECIALLY the church. People have been burnt at the stake as heretics for proclaiming the contrary. And it was only dispelled with (here come different versions):

• Columbus — and before he sailed out, people thought he’d fall off the end of the flat earth.
• Magellan — when he sailed round and came out the other end people caught on.
• Copernicus (or better still Galileo) — and this was apparently the subject of Galileo’s trial!

All of these things are false. Not just untrue but quite astoundingly false, and the real story is much more interesting.

It’s true that most ancient cultures assumed some kind of flat earth (I don’t even know if there’s evidence of a major civilisation or tradition without this belief — if anyone knows, let me know) until the ancient Greeks. There were probably many people who came up with the idea of a spherical earth but the most famous is Eratosthenes (of the Eratosthenes’ Sieve fame, for those who have had to suffer through that in high school maths…). He (around 200 BCE) went on holiday over a thousand kilometres from his home and noticed that the local sundial made a different angle at midday than at home. He reasoned that the earth was spherical and therefore each place is at a slightly different angle to the sun. He made the fortuitous assumption that the sun was big and far away — not a little object just hovering over the earth. He even used the difference in angles to measure the earth’s circumference and got a surprisingly accurate result.

Other evidence available to the ancients:

• ships on the horizon seem to sink as they get further, but then they come back without falling off.
• as you change latitude, the elevation of stars changes as if you’re on a sphere.
• during a lunar eclipes, the shadow is always a circle and not an ellipse and the only shape that could cast such a shadow from all angles is the humble sphere.

Most educated Greeks came to accept this idea, although it was still hard to imagine an upside-down world on the other side of the earth (the Antipodes).

Along comes Aristotle, who among his million and one achievements comes up with an entire theory of the universe. The earth is a sphere at the centre and the planets and the rest move in concentric circles with the same centre. Also, because he believed a stone falls to the ground because all things naturally tend to the centre of the earth (which is also the centre of the universe), there was no problem of the Antipodes. The mythological peoples around modern day Australia, South America etc. may have been seen to be weird, but at least they, like all other things, tended to the centre of the earth and did not fall off.

This kookyness did not catch on universally but it grew. There were regular objections to the round earth theory from scholars and natural philosophers. However, these were more like individual voices in a growing tide of non-flatism. These voices became quieter and by I think the middle of the Dark Ages (!) they were not taken seriously. Instead, we have a Church with influence in the early period by Augustine who was a round-earther and in the medieval period by Thomas Aquinas who in effect “brought Aristotle to the church” and hence his cosmological view was very spherical indeed. Of course, in the early period, many clergymen were reluctant to accept this as a manifestation of the vain, heathen Greek science. Again, this attitude ended much sooner than people think.

The view that was entrenched was Ptolemy’s adaptation of Aristotle’s system with the shape of the earth unaltered. Others came to make observations and changes. There was Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Clavius, Galileo, Newton, etc etc. All of them took the spherical earth as a very natural, commonly held and firmly established belief. Here’s an ebook with more.

Whence the myth then? Historical consensus is that it it originated with the writer Washington Irving (possibly as a joke!) when he wrote a novel about Columbus. I haven’t read it but maybe he didn’t intend for it to be a serious historical novel. Or he did and screwed up as many of us do on our best days. All in all, in the novel, before Columbus sets out, people are worried he’ll fall off the edge. Another alternative is that this was concocted by anti-religious enlightenists to show the perceived ignorance of the church.

Yes there is an anti-religious sentiment attached to the myth, at least a little. This is the idea of religion being a cause of ignorance, and something that slows down “progress”, at least of the scientific kind. This may be true in many specific historical instances but it’s not a universal law. Certainly, this is a good myth to believe for those who aren’t very fond of religion. Those who went against the spherical earth did it largely for religious purposes, but these literalist interpretations didn’t catch on. And no, no matter how much those who are anti-Bible and anti-Koran scream about both of these books espousing a flat earth view, we just don’t know for sure. Neither are written in textbook format – the “cosmological” references are in both cases extremely poetic and mirror our own everyday speech. That we say “sunrise” is NOT evidence that we belive in a flat earth, neither are those texts when they use metaphors. The only argument is that because we see many other cultures around the Bible Koran to be flat-earthers, we can assume these were. Nothing in the TEXTS however proves it. On a similar note, it’s very easy to read the idea of a flat earth from, say a medieval world map. But those who know how hard it is to violate the spherical earth and bash it onto a flat piece of paper will know that any map created before trigonometry and other tools were developed will look flat. A lot of these maps must have been made by round-earthers.

The second sentiment in accepting this myth is I think an even more prominent one – the anti-historical sentiment. This is the idea that our society is special and enlightened and that the previous ages were crap. The idea of the flath earth then becomes a metaphor for the blindest kind of ignorance – this is how stupid they were (or for the more open-minded, this is how stupid WE as humanity are) – we/they believed in a flat earth, the most obvious of bad ideas! This may not be how the myth started but I think this is why we as a society continue to believe it. There’s an obvious self-congratulatory aspect, even if many people wouldn’t know much about the science of working out if the earth is flat or not.

I was looking one of those logic/puzzle quizzes (the Reader’s Digest puzzle magazine) and it had a few general science knowledge questions. One of them was something like “(true or false): Copernicus the first person to suggest that the world was not flat”. And the answer? “False, Aristotle also known to have suggested this”. Yeah thanks! Perhaps that mythical period between 550 and 1492 (or later) weren’t the only dark ages!