believe in science. I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust, but that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”13 Of course, if he really wanted to see the curvature of the earth from a high altitude, there are lots of safer ways, which are discussed at the end of the chapter, that would not risk his life and health. On February 22, 2020, Hughes paid the ultimate price for denying reality when his rocket crashed and killed him.
Hearing all this, most people shake their heads and wonder what has happened to our society and education system that the weirdest of all ideas is actively being debated in mainstream media and that someone as famous as Neil deGrasse Tyson feels it is worth his time to debunk it. Hasn’t the reality of the round earth been established since the time of Columbus? As Tyson tweeted, “Duude—to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”14
As astronomer and author Phil Plait wrote in 2008,
The world is filled with dumbosity, and it’s all we can do to fight it. But sometimes an idea is so ridiculous that you have to wonder if it’s a joke. Yeah, I mean the Flat Earthers. Can people in the 21st century really think the Earth is a flat disk, and not a sphere? When I see their claims I have to wonder if it’s an elaborate hoax, their attempt to poke a hornet’s nest just to see how reality-based people react. The media will sometimes talk to these goofballs, and I’m glad to report it’s almost always tongue-in-cheek, which is probably more than they deserve.15
Myths of Columbus
Actually, it’s a myth that most people in 1492 thought the earth was flat and that they scorned Columbus because he was convinced it was round. In fact, most educated people have known that the earth is round for at least 2,500 years. Ancient Greeks noticed that the earth cast a curved shadow on the moon during an eclipse. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato wrote that the creator “made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures.”16 Plato’s student Aristotle noticed that if he traveled north or south, it changed which stars he could see above him, and later astronomers discovered that if you traveled to the Southern Hemisphere, the constellations are entirely different.
About 200 BCE, the Hellenistic Greek scholar Eratosthenes famously estimated the circumference and diameter of the earth. He had heard stories that the sunlight shone vertically down into the bottom of a deep well only at high noon on the summer solstice in Syene, about two hundred kilometers south of Alexandria down the Nile River near the modern Aswan High Dam. By using a long rod to measure the length of its shadow and calculating the angle of the vertical rod with the sun overhead in Alexandria, he was able to measure the difference in the angles between Syene and Alexandria (fig. 2.1). Using simple geometry, he estimated the circumference of the earth to be about forty thousand kilometers. This is amazingly accurate, less than 0.16 percent off the value that we now accept.
Nor did the discoveries of the Greeks die with the “Dark Ages” and the loss of most of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Although some medieval scholars thought the earth was flat, most of them had read Plato and Aristotle and accepted their evidence that the earth was round. About 1250 CE, the medieval scholar John Sacrobosco wrote Treatise on a Sphere, with multiple proofs of the curvature of the earth. In it, he said,
That the earth, too, is round is shown thus. The signs and stars do not rise and set the same for all men everywhere but rise and set sooner for those in the east than for those in the west; and of this there is no other cause than the bulge of the earth. Moreover, celestial phenomena evidence that they rise sooner for Orientals than for westerners. For one and the same eclipse of the moon which appears to us in the first hour of the night appears to Orientals about the third hour of the night, which proves that they had night and sunset before we did, of which setting the bulge of the earth is the cause.17
Figure 2.1. Diagram showing Eratosthenes’s famous experiment to calculate the size and curvature of the earth. He noticed that at summer solstice, the sun was directly overhead in Syene (which is on the Tropic of Cancer, where the sun’s rays come straight down on the first day of summer). Meanwhile, to the north where he lived in Alexandria, the sun made a 7° angle from a post sticking vertically above the ground. Eratosthenes used this angle and the known distance between Syene and Alexandria to calculate the size of the earth to within 1 percent of the values we know now. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
The myth that most educated people in the medieval times and up to 1492 believed in a flat earth is a relatively recent notion. As Jeffrey Burton Russell documented in his 1991 book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, American author Washington Irving, famous for his stories of Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” created this fiction; he needed to spice up the conflict between the Church and Columbus in order to improve the drama for his 1828 book, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving was very widely read and cited, so his myth entered all the American history textbooks for the next century. Even as late as 1983, it was still widely believed, and the myth appeared in historian Daniel Boorstin’s best-selling book, The Discoverers.
Modern Flat-Earthism
In fact, flat-earth beliefs were a rare fringe idea with few followers until relatively recently. In the 1800s, the most famous flat-earther was Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). In the 1860s, he pioneered the modern flat-earther notion that the earth was a disk centered over the North Pole (fig. 2.2), bounded on its outer edge by a wall of ice (instead of Antarctica over the South Pole, which cannot exist in their version of geography). The skies above were a dome of fixed stars only five thousand kilometers above the earth’s surface, consistent with the old medieval notion of the heavens before the birth of modern astronomy. His ideas were first published in a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy, followed by a book called Earth Is Not a Globe, and another pamphlet, The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and Its Opposition to the Scriptures, which revealed the biblical literalist roots of most flat-earth thinking.
According to Rowbotham, the “Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture.”18 He is correct in saying this, because there are at least sixteen places where the Bible says the earth is flat; talks about the “four corners of the earth,” the “ends of the earth,” and the “circle of the earth”; or suggests that you can see the entire earth from a high place.19 Rowbotham and later followers like William Carpenter and Lady Elizabeth Blount kept promoting the idea and founded the Universal Zetetic Society after Rowbotham’s death in 1884. This incarnation of flat-earth thinking died out some time after 1904.
After about fifty years of virtually no organized activity, the rebirth of flat-earth thinking occurred in 1956 with the founding of Samuel Shenton’s International Flat Earth Research Society, based in his home in Dover, England. Always a tiny group, with a very limited membership, they corresponded through a homemade mailed newsletter, yet every once in a while, they managed to get a short burst of publicity in the newspapers. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts first began to produce images of the earth from space, Shenton dismissed the images as hoaxes (the common belief among flat-earthers ever since), saying, “It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.”20 Later, he attributed the curvature
