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Perhaps it is not the people of the Middle Ages who should be accused of clinging to erroneous beliefs, Mr. Singham suggests.
CAN we all agree to bury that resilient myth that it was Columbus' journey to the New World that proved that the world was round? In the excellent November 2006 issue of the Kappan, which dealt with education about Native Americans, one of the guest editors uses the Columbus story to argue that "a study of American history must include the history of those whose lineage can be traced hack hundreds of years hefore European seafarers began to wonder if ships might not fall off the edge of the world."
Similarly, in The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman repeats the error when he writes, "Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery."
Well, no, he didn't. Thomas Kuhn in The Copeniiatn Revolution showed clearly in 1957 that the idea of a flat Earth was rejected very early in recorded history. There are references to the measurement of the Earth's circumference that appear in the writings of Aristotle (384-322 BCE), but the first complete record of this measurement comes from Eratosthenes (276-194 BCE), the librarian of Alexandria, who arrived at a figure that was off by only about 5% from present-day measurements.
The belief in the sphericity of the Earth, even back in those early days, was based on careful observations and solid reasoning. The fact that the hulls of ships moving away disappeared before their masts; the fact that, if you were on high ground, you could see more of the ship than when you were at sea level; the circular edge of the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during lunar eclipses - all were convincing arguments against a flat Earth, and educated people as early as Classical times, accepted them as conclusive. Even the idea of sailing westward from Europe to reach India was originally proposed by geographer Strabo, who was born around 63 BCE.
Aristarchus (310-230 BCE) and others in the third century BCE even made sophisticated measurements of the sizes of the Moon and the Sun and the various...