By Christine Garwood
ISBN-10: 0312382081
ISBN-13: 9780312382087
Contrary to well known trust fostered in numerous university school rooms internationally, Christopher Columbus didn't notice that the earth was once around. the belief of a round international have been commonly accredited in proficient circles from as early because the fourth century b.c. but, bizarrely, it was once no longer until eventually the supposedly extra rational 19th century that the proposal of a ?at earth relatively took carry. much more bizarrely, it persists to today, regardless of Apollo missions and largely publicized images of the decidedly round Earth from space.
in line with a variety of unique resources, Garwood’s background of ?at-Earth beliefs---from the Babylonians to the current day---raises concerns primary to the historical past and philosophy of technological know-how, its courting to faith and the making of human wisdom concerning the wildlife. Flat Earth is the ?rst de?nitive examine of 1 of history’s so much infamous and protracted rules, and it conjures up the entire highbrow, philosophical, and non secular turmoil of the fashionable age. starting from historic Greece, via Victorian England, to modern day the USA, it is a tale that encompasses faith, technology, and pseudoscience, in addition to a staggering array of individuals and locations. the place else may perhaps eccentric aristocrats, fundamentalist preachers, and conspiracy theorists look along Copernicus, Newton, and NASA, other than in an account of this sort of mythical misconception?
Thoroughly stress-free and illuminating, Flat Earth is social and highbrow heritage at its best.
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Additional resources for Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea
Example text
Sarna, Understanding Genesis, 1966. 2 – With thanks to Paul Cox. 3 – Mary Evans Picture Library. 4 – Mary Evans Picture Library. 5 – Reproduced by kind permission of Ann and Felicity Coltman. 6 – Author’s collection. 7 – Mary Evans Picture Library. 8 – Mary Evans Picture Library. 9 – From the Mechanics’ Magazine, 29 March 1861. 10 – With thanks to Paul Cox. 11 – Mary Evans Picture Library / College of Psychic Studies. 12 – From T. W. Wallace, Autobiography of Thomas Wilkinson Wallis, Sculptor in Wood (1899).
Nevertheless, the Copernican thesis was explored and expanded by German mathematician Johannes Kepler, who discovered that the planets do not trace a circular course round the sun, as Copernicus had thought, but instead move in ellipses. Meanwhile, in Italy, Galileo Galilei was using a telescope to make a number of discoveries that contradicted the Aristotelian system with empirical proof of a Copernican sun-centred universe. Most widely lauded in later popular imagination, however, was Cambridge-based mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, whose classic works, the Principia (1687) and Opticks (1709), underpinned the marriage of mathematics with astronomy.
The rotundity of the earth was a ‘marvellous fiction’, a lie spread by pagans for sinister motives or the ‘sake of a jest’, and as the Bible was somewhat unclear about the shape of the earth, he concluded that the subject was irrelevant anyway. 18 Nevertheless, in the sixth century Lactantius was joined by Byzantine merchant and Christian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes. An obscure figure, it is said that he travelled widely – possibly to Abyssinia, Ceylon, western India and more – and earned the name ‘Indicopleustes’, the Indian traveller, as a consequence of his experiences.
Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood
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