Columbus Day has come and gone, but debunking myths never goes out of date. Rachel Motte takes on the silly notion (still taught in some textbooks!) that Columbus believed the earth was flat:
“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” but not because he wanted to defy any maniacally tyrannical flat earthers. That this falsehood still endures in countless textbooks is both remarkable and (if you’re like me) completely maddening.
You see, there were no serious flat earthers in Columbus’ time. None. Everyone with much education knew that the world was, is, and ever shall be, round. In fact, everyone had known this about the earth for ages.
So why is it that my daughter’s homework today read “On Columbus Day, we remember a sailor named Christopher Columbus. During his time, people thought the world was flat.”? Half the books I found in the library echoed the same refrain, despite the fact that this bit of historical fluff has been disproved over, and over, and over…
Why has such a silly idea found such remarkable staying power? The various answers to that question are nearly as infuriating as the myth itself. There are several theories.
October 12th, 2011 | 11:47 am
How do the people who claim Columbus thought the world was flat explain his idea of reaching the “East Indies” by sailing west?
On the other hand, maybe the earth is flat. It looks flat to me, just like the sun looks like it rises in the east and sinks in the west. I see these things with my own eyes. I don’t want arrogant scientists telling me that what I see with my own eyes is wrong!
October 12th, 2011 | 11:53 am
David, I think it’s because the narrative is that Columbus was the only one who had it right, and he just barely convinced the Spanish monarchs to go along with his obviously crazy idea, and no one else believed it would work.
Is your second paragraph responding to some actual person?
October 12th, 2011 | 12:52 pm
In the splendid book ‘A Splendid Exchange’ by William Bernstein, he describes Columbus’s situation as even worse than that. The conventional wisdom, not only knew the Earth was round, but also how big it was. The naysayers all asserted that Columbus and his crew would simply die of thirst before they reached the Indies. Columbus erroneously thought the globe was much smaller, and basically lucked out out that the Americas got in his way.
October 12th, 2011 | 12:55 pm
From The Canterbury Tales (written in the late 1300s):
“Aurelius with blissful heart anon
Answered thus; “Fie on a thousand pound!
This wide world, which that men say is round,
I would it give, if I were lord of it.” “
October 12th, 2011 | 1:37 pm
At the very beginning of his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas said:
“Reply to Objection 2. Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.”
Summa Theologiae Ia.1.1
October 12th, 2011 | 1:50 pm
Ancient Greeks perceived the world as round. Columbus and other educated people of the day probably agreed, even if they didn’t understand the science or the literal Biblical witness.
October 12th, 2011 | 2:33 pm
My question (and I’m sure there’s a good answer for this) is how was it that the Norse knew five centuries earlier that there was something there that wasn’t China, but the rest of Europe did not? Was it lack of communication, lack of written records, lack of trust in northern “legends,” or something else?
October 12th, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Pentamom: I can’t tell you whether Columbus had ever heard of Leif Ericson, but he definitely HAD heard the legends of St. Brendan the Navigator, an Irish monk who, some claim, may have sailed to the Americas. Columbus surmised that St. Brendan had, in fact,travelled to the Indies.
Before seeking funding from European kings and queens, Columbus went to Galway, Ireland, in search of any documentation St. Brendan may have left behind.
October 12th, 2011 | 7:55 pm
@David,
Columbus, even in myth, never claimed the earth was flat, but then neither did anyone else. It was understood by educated society that it is was round as was proved by the ancient Greeks. The Greeks also measured its circumference using trigonometry. Their number was much bigger than Columbus hoped it was. Columbus was wrong but found something else. I believe he may have died not realizing his error.
We should honor him as a risk-taker and a persuader who attempted something bigger than himself.
I rather like the sobriquet “Indian” being a quarter Yaqui myself. It reminds us that Columbus didn’t know where he was.
October 12th, 2011 | 8:33 pm
Mike,
I remember Isaac Asimov pointing out that those who did take earth to be flat were very close to being right. A curvature of 8 inches per mile is not going to result in things rolling off a “level” surface and is negligible in most everyday experiences, especially if you live inland and can’t see ships disappearing over the horizon. Also, most people can get along just fine thinking of the sun traveling around the earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. You are also fine, for all practical purposes, in insisting that pi is 3.14159265358979323, no more and no less. But you are nevertheless wrong, or at least not as near to being right as you could be.
October 12th, 2011 | 8:50 pm
I suspect that the popular myth of Medieval flat-earth ideas arises from a conflation of a flat-earth with geocentric cosmology.
The difference between the two, of course, is that it is very difficult to disprove the geocentric universe without very precise observation and a lot of mathematics, while anyone who thinks about geometry can tell that the surface of the earth is curved.
October 13th, 2011 | 12:06 am
“The difference between the two, of course, is that it is very difficult to disprove the geocentric universe without very precise observation and a lot of mathematics, while anyone who thinks about geometry can tell that the surface of the earth is curved.”
Anyone who looks through a telescope can falsify Ptolemaic astronomy quite easily. Once you have falsified Ptolemy’s model with its semi-elegant simplicity, there is no good reason to still think the earth is the center of the universe except for nostalgic reasons.
October 13th, 2011 | 3:29 am
Excellent comment, by William. Aquinas, and the other great medievals, did not believe in a flat earth! I would recommend Peter Kreeft, the great Catholic philosopher’s excellent book, SUMMMA OF THE SUMMA, where he talks about how Aquinas did NOT believe in a “flat earth”, and quotes Aquinas. This work, by Dr. Kreeft, is an excellent selection of parts of Aquinas’s great SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, with Peter Kreeft’s excellent commentary on it. (It’s available from IGNATIUS PRESS).
Also, an excellent book, on various myths, relating to science and religion (among other things), and a fascinating read, is GALILEO GOES TO JAIL: AND OTHER MYTHS ABOUT SCIENCE AND RELIGION, edited by Ronald Numbers, (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009)
October 13th, 2011 | 9:07 am
There seems to be some confusion between the world’s being thought to be “round” and its being known to be “spherical.”
Many passages in the Bible suggest the view that the world is a flat (round) disk, over which the firmament sits like an inverted bowl. This is consonant with the observation that Earth’s shadow on Moon, in an eclipse, is round.
Most educated Greeks “knew” that Earth was spherical. Eratosthenes made an estimate of the circumference which is correct to first order and Aristarchus of Samos promulgated the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
However, in Columbus’ time, most people did not study astronomy and probably did, in fact, believe Earth was flat. The textbooks do not say “everybody believed Earth was flat” but just “people believed Earth was flat,” meaning most people. Once Magellan had circumnavigated it, nobody believed that anymore.
October 13th, 2011 | 12:42 pm
@David, I wish I knew what you were getting about. To be sure, for subsistence farmers who live their entire lives within a mile or two of their fields, a flat earth is sufficient to living their lives. But Columbus’ voyage was longer than that, indeed he was hoping to go the way opposite to the long established Silk Road, which was disrupted at the time by the expanding Islamic Caliphate. So his trip required the Earth be round.
The myth as taught is that Columbus argued before a committee of Cardinals, who, for religious reasons, argued the world was flat. The committee reported back to Isabella that Columbus was wrong.
The committee existed, led by a fellow named Talavera, if my memory serves. They did report to Isabella that Columbus was wrong. However, the report was he was wrong in his estimate of the circumference, known, as Resh notes, from Eratothenes. Flatness didn’t figure into the issue at all. Columbus could not reach Asia in the time frame he allotted for himself. The committee was right. Columbus was wrong.
I have to admit that Joe, for some reason, suggests that Columbus is a flat earther in the myth (probably just the choice of words) which is the opposite of the myth.
Resh, on the other hand, makes a different mistake. I agree that the vast majority of people at the time lived as if the earth was flat. But the idea that they believed it is pulled out of thin air. We have no way of knowing that. More likely, they simply didn’t think about it much as it didn’t affect them. The idea that Magellan’s circumnavigation changed everybody’s belief, I find absurd. There was no internet, no global news networks, no international newspapers. In fact, that same vast majority couldn’t read. Most of them probably never heard of Magellan, let alone his significance. Their lives continued as before. OTOH, they may well have learned of the Spanish colonies in the “New World”. Silver from Mexico financed the Hapsburg’s wars in Europe and disrupted the Chinese Empire as it dealt with the silver influx. But that took time.
@Mark, First, you need a telescope.
@Bret, Thanks for the book pointers, more for my reading list.
I’ve tried to correct the Director of my wife’s Montessori preschool on the Columbus myth through my wife. The Director admitted the myth but kept teaching the 3 and 4 year-olds the myth because “it was easier to understand.” I did manage to correct a Catholic theology student who thought Galileo was burned at the stake. (I’m afraid I was none too gentle.)
October 13th, 2011 | 2:57 pm
I don’t want arrogant scientists telling me that what I see with my own eyes is wrong!
This is why real-world experience is so crucial.
No matter how many times scientists prove something in the laboratory, if it doesn’t work in the real world, then one should be cautious about listening to scientists.
After all, the worst horrors of the 20th century (which was itself the most horrific century in the history of the world as we know it) all arose from scientific ideas that sounded great until they were tried in real life.
If Columbus had fallen off the edge of the world, it would be wrong to listen to scientists no matter how good their PowerPoint presentations looked.
October 13th, 2011 | 2:59 pm
The Director admitted the myth but kept teaching the 3 and 4 year-olds the myth because “it was easier to understand.”
Here we have the real root of the problem.
I caught a lot of these when I had kids in the public schools.
How can teachers possibly expect students to take learning – or truth – seriously, when they themselves are role models teaching exactly the opposite?
October 13th, 2011 | 3:01 pm
David, I wish I knew what you were getting about.
Mike,
I am making sly (or at least I think so) references to the On the Square piece by Peter J. Leithart titled Does the Sun Rise? in which he says:
He does conclude:
I still haven’t quite figured out the point of the article. Like the “subsistence farmers who live their entire lives within a mile or two of their fields,” and for whom the concept of a flat earth is just fine, the the notion of a stationary earth with a sun and the stars revolving around it was just fine for biblical times, but in this day and age of geosynchronous and geostationary satellites, views of earth from the moon, a Coriolis effect easily verified by watching video from weather satellites, observation of a Foucault pendulum, and so on, beyond the use of everyday speech, I don’t think it makes much sense to insist that the sun rises, when we have a much deeper understanding of the motion of the earth and the sun.
October 13th, 2011 | 4:14 pm
After all, the worst horrors of the 20th century (which was itself the most horrific century in the history of the world as we know it) all arose from scientific ideas that sounded great until they were tried in real life.
Blake,
Examples, please.
October 13th, 2011 | 6:52 pm
David N.
I am confused. Are you asking for examples of the ‘worst horrors’ or the ‘scientific ideas that sounded great until they were tried in real life’. In either case we are dealing with what our military friends term a “target rich environment”…
October 13th, 2011 | 8:50 pm
“I still haven’t quite figured out the point of the article.”
That is evident, and it’s evident that you didn’t figure out the points I was making in my comments on that article either, which were related but not precisely the same ones.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but you really don’t seem to have grasped the point, so lampooning a point that you misconstrue isn’t very useful or very funny.
October 13th, 2011 | 9:41 pm
“The Director admitted the myth but kept teaching the 3 and 4 year-olds the myth because “it was easier to understand.”
“Easier to understand” for 3 or 4 year olds than what? Than “people hadn’t yet figured out how to sail west because no one had yet done it?” What is hard about that? You don’t have to get into the complexities of navigation to explain to young children that going to a place by a way no one has ever taken before is a challenge. You just have to avoid saying something you know is a deliberate LIE.
The potential for stupidity in educated people never ceases to amaze me.
October 13th, 2011 | 10:21 pm
Ah! David, you’re still lost in an older article. Let me put it this way. Einstein’s theory of relativity holds that Newton was wrong, except that Newton’s physics hold just fine in our small scale, slow speed world. So, even scientists, in fact, especially scientists depend on Newton’s laws, as wrong as they are. If we can understand that, then we might understand why a subsistence farmer wouldn’t care about the shape of the Earth as a whole. And we would be less susceptible to myths, as in untrue stories, that confirm our biases.
October 14th, 2011 | 3:51 am
Derrida observes somewhere that “The objective features of a phenomenon so little constrain the ways it is classified and theorized that these features can be disregarded in trying to understand why a particular classification system or scientific theory has been adopted.”
October 14th, 2011 | 7:34 am
I don’t mean to be snarky, but you really don’t seem to have grasped the point, so lampooning a point that you misconstrue isn’t very useful or very funny.
pentamom,
You may be correct that I have not grasped the point that the sun “really” rises and sets, and that science is “arrogant” to say it doesn’t. As I said in that thread, as I understand the point of Peter J. Leithart’s article, it is either trivial or false. If a group of astronomers were on a camping trip and someone said, “We’ll break camp at sunrise,” no fellow astronomer would say, “Wrong! The sun doesn’t really rise! It just appears to rise due to the rotation of the earth!” But an astronomer who did say that wouldn’t be “arrogant” and wrong, but rather pedantic and right.
October 14th, 2011 | 11:27 am
“You may be correct that I have not grasped the point that the sun “really” rises and sets, and that science is “arrogant” to say it doesn’t.”
This indicates that you haven’t grasped the point of Leithart’s post. If you admit not grasping why the point you think he’s making is important, you either think he’s stupid (not a very constructive attitude if you’re going to have any respect for what’s published here) or you have to admit that you don’t know enough about what’s going on to make fun of it. I’m not criticizing you for this, I’m just saying that a lampoon based on a misunderstanding of the point isn’t effective, it just reveals your misunderstanding. Or else, it just reveals your willingness to assume that one of the articles posted On The Square is stupid, rather than to consider that maybe you’re just not getting the whole picture.
October 14th, 2011 | 6:25 pm
I’m not criticizing you for this . . .
pentamom,
Of course you’re criticizing me. You love to criticize me.
you either think he’s stupid
Please don’t attribute such things to me. I don’t consider everyone I disagree with to be stupid. I don’t consider people who I think are flat-out wrong on certain points to be stupid. I am sure, for example, that a great many people who believe in Intelligent Design know far, far more than I do. I am sure there are many people who believe the earth literally was created in six days are a lot more intelligent than I am. I don’t think they are stupid. I think they are wrong. In fact, when it comes to the Creationists, I know they are wrong. But I don’t call them stupid.
October 15th, 2011 | 9:22 am
Okay, you’re right, that was not fair, saying you think he’s stupid.
David, I know I have a tendency to criticize you. But please understand, when I say I don’t intend to criticize, that’s when I’m trying to make a different point.
Still, my point is, that you didn’t grasp the point of his post, and you seemed to know that, so lampooning your admittedly partial understanding of something you didn’t quite grasp isn’t very constructive.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact