Could the earth be flat?

Many years ago I did an Astronomy O Level - one of the questions was about prooving that the Earth is round. One of the answers I gave was placing two sticks in the ground at different latitudes at the same time time and measuring the length of the shadows. The stick at the higher latitude will have a longer shadow. Eratosthenes did this over two thousand years ago and measured the circumference of the Earth with surprising accuracy. I was looking for a website to back this up and came across this interesting one with experiments you can do yourself - including the one I mentioned... Have fun!

Top 10 ways to know that the Earth is not flat

When I was down under in Australia coming from Europe I enjoyed walking
upside down.

The only thing uncomfortable about this was the blood rushing into
my head.

If one stands on the top of a hill and gazes into the horizon, the earth's roundness is visible.

reply to post by Freq Of Nature

If you look closely when you spin a coin you can see sometimes there is a what looks to be a hole in the middle!

Really? a hole in the middle?
I don't think the ancients were stupid. Religious dark ages dogma of the times may have dictated a flat earth. It's naive to think people believed it.
You just can't look at the moon every night and not get the picture.

[edit on 12-4-2010 by randyvs]

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
reply to post by RuneSpider

 

O M G !!!

Seriously ? I didn't no that.

I'm starting to wonder how many school hours were useles. Life wasting time being spend.

I mix up names and stuff but I really learned something else then what you just told me.

It's sad but true that most of us apparently were miseducated about some subjects and the flat Earth myth was one of them.


The Myth of the Flat Earth

According to Jeffrey Burton Russell here, the invention of the flat Earth myth can be laid at the feet of Washington Irving, who included it in his historical novel on Columbus, and the wider idea that the everyone in the Middle Ages was deluded has been widely accepted ever since.

What's really sad, is that in 1945 it was known to be a historical error, yet most of us were taught the false history about the flat Earth myth after that! My question is, if this was known to be false history in 1945, why were they still teaching it to us well after that?

Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

In 1945 the Historical Association listed "Columbus and the Flat Earth Conception" second of twenty in its first-published pamphlet on common errors in history.

It makes me wonder how much other stuff we were taught is also wrong.

Originally posted by Cytokine_Strom
My thoughts are that there are people coming on ATS and posting steaming great loads of tosh to lower the standard of the forum and to make all conspiricy theorists look like nuts.

We have all hear the term "flat earthers" leveled at global warming deniers. Is this an attempt to link the ATS community with the term as well.

i literally was going to say the same.

reply to post by Freq Of Nature

Let me start by saying that I am in no way scientific but

Could the earth be flat?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/787dab707a15.jpg[/atsimg]


The Earth is about as Flat as Dolly...I can't believe you even got 1 star for this - welfare seems to have extended beyond food stamps.

I thinnk the idea the ancients believed the world was flat has a lot of staying power for much the same reason the idea we only use about 10% of our brains still sticks around.
We like to think we are idiots for some reason.

I've spent a lot of time lately relearning what i learned in school... but this time I'm paying a bit more attention and digging a little bit deeper.

reply to post by Freq Of Nature


Being an avid sky diver, I've seen the curvature of the Earth on many occasions on a clear day.

So I know it's pretty much round. That and all those photos from the ISS.

~Keeper

For debunking the myth that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat (and particularly that the Church was always tied to that idea), Nicole Oresme is a great thinker to look into. He was a 14th century priest (eventually bishop) who wrote at length on many subjects including cosmology. Here's a snip from the Wiki article on him; I highly recommend reading the original (in translation) as a great eye opener about medieval thought.

In his Livre du ciel et du monde Oresme discussed a range of evidence for and against the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis. From astronomical considerations, he maintained that if the Earth were moving and not the celestial spheres, all the movements that we see in the heavens that are computed by the astronomers would appear exactly the same as if the spheres were rotating around the Earth. He rejected the physical argument that if the Earth were moving the air would be left behind causing a great wind from east to west. In his view the Earth, Water, and Air would all share the same motion. As to the scriptural passage that speaks of the motion of the sun, he concludes that "this passage conforms to the customary usage of popular speech" and is not to be taken literally. He also noted that it would be more economical for the small Earth to rotate on its axis than the immense sphere of the stars. Nonetheless, he concluded that none of these arguments were conclusive and "everyone maintains, and I think myself, that the heavens do move and not the Earth."

Source

Note that not only is he assuming a spherical earth, he is presenting and considering the possibility that it is the earth that moves and not the sun. Yeah okay, he eventually seems unable to bring himself to accept what his own argument is suggesting, but this does give evidence of a great deal more open-mindedness than our stereotype would suggest.