Europe and the Islamic world alike seem to have reached this same conclusion at approximately the same time the Jesuits, already revered for their mastery of science and technology, helped spread both Christianity and round worldness to the rest of the world.Īs the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once quipped, “There never was a period of ‘flat Earth darkness’ among scholars … Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.” I mean it may as well just be this, right? YouTubeĪs astronomy became a more robust science, more evidence began to accumulate to suggest the world was round. European debate, in particular, centered about the existence of the antipodes - the opposite poles of the globe - and whether those portions of the world had landmasses. Up to this point, no one had traveled the earth to prove its roundness. It would still be more than a dozen centuries before the Copernican revolution succeeded in demonstrating the Earth is not the center of the universe, but this meant the Church - a central figure in the early days of science - supported the idea of a round Earth. Pliny the Elder, a pal of Roman emperor Vespasian in the first century, used his influence to push for greater round Earth acceptance among the empire’s populace. By 330 B.C., the most influential philosopher of Western civilization, Aristotle, came out as a “round-Earther.”īy 200 B.C., Ptolemy had drafted an atlas of the globe using latitude and longitude lines. Thank the ancient Greeks for kicking off the spherical Earth gospel - first in 600 B.C.
Nearly every ancient civilization mythologized their perception of the world as a mass of flat land floating on the ocean. The problem will, unfortunately, be a persistent one. Come on, Kyrie Irving - your team is the reigning NBA champs! Your antics are starting to get Neil deGrasse Tyson riled up again! Nevertheless, it’s excruciatingly aggravating to see a slew of celebrities coming out and unabashedly declaring their belief in the flatness of the world. Flat-Earthers aren’t dead, but there’s 2,000 years of science riding on this. Okay, that’s perhaps a bit harsh, especially given the fact that the stakes are so low. Let’s cut right to the chase: How the hell are flat-Earthers still a thing? How did we get to a point in today’s society where a rapper without a hit in years can light up social media with a screed about how Earth is a completely flat plane, then bait a preeminent science celebrity into a bizarre rap beef?
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