It’s a mad old world-Arts & Entertainment-Books-History-TimesOnline
This looks like an interesting book, covering the history of the idea of the earth being flat. It was not as common an idea as some people seem to think:
....it’s really quite stupid and credulous of us now to believe that most medieval people thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world. They could see as well as you or I that a ship disappears over the horizon after a few miles, or that during a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth on the moon is round. Duh. There was “no mutiny of flat-earth sailors on the Santa Maria”.
Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, St Augustine and Bede were all firm “globularists”, in Garwood’s pleasing neologism, while Newton refined things still further by showing that we really lived on an “oblate spheroid” (the earth bulges in the middle, to you and me).
Thats interesting. Didn't ptolemy or one of them meaure (to within a small error) the diameter of the Earth by using the distance a sticks shadow moved at two locations in Egypt or something like that?
ReplyDelete