As opposed to round like it really is?
And did such beliefs really lead to ridicules, controversies, major arguments and possibly multi-million dollar discoveries, lifetimes of studies, hard work and other whathaveyas?
People still believe the Earth is flat.
Here's a passage from a book by HAWKING:
https://www.fisica.net/relatividade/stephen_hawking_a_brief_history_of_time.pdf
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He
described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast
collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and
said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very
clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do
we think we know better?
That's an apocryphal story, especially since Hawking admits no one knows who this "well-known scientist" was. Further, it's mixing Buddhism with pseudo-Christian flatearthism.
in approximately 240 b.c., Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-194 b.c.) accurately measured the Earth's circumference.
Yes they did and some still do.
shareThere are still a bunch of silly people who claim the Earth is flat but I suspect that most of them are trolling and only a small percentage are simply stupid
Not stupid. There are a few where I work. They're intelligent, but a bit mental. It allows them to feel special from the rest of us who are being conned by a "mass conspiracy".
Talking to one is to enter the Twilight Zone.
I imagine they did, but their world was pretty small in eons past. Survival was paramount and I imagine many folks never even thought about the Earth possibly being round. All they could go by was what they saw around them.
Even just a hundred or so years ago, many people never left their hometowns. Getting places was difficult due to poor or nonexistent transportation modes. Scientific knowledge was limited, as formal education. I'm sure there was plenty of skepticism when scientists began studying the wider world and learned that the Earth was indeed, round.
how would they know otherwise?
shareOne clue is that the mast of a ship appears before the rest - https://ds055uzetaobb.cloudfront.net/brioche/uploads/a5XaP9YEwL-ship-horizon-1.png?width=600
Another might be the phases of the moon: some are curved. Same with the curve of an eclipse. You could say a curved flat disk but maybe there is a reason that couldn't be.
I am not sure the Greeks/Persians/Romans sailed far enough to notice
shareThe Greeks certainly knew the Earth was round. Eratosthenes Actually measured the circumference to a fairly accurate degree. Pythagoras 2700 years ago knew the Earth was round.
Flat Earth is a newer idea. We seem to be going backwards.
was that accepted back then? my point was that the greeks didn't do much sailing.
shareIt was and the Greeks sailed. The Greeks had a navy to fight the Persians.
The ancients had other proofs as well. As nyctc7 mentioned the shape of Earths shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse shows the earth must be round.
eastern mediterranean only for the navy. it was all theoretical back then.
shareIt wasn’t just ships, they saw the earth cast a circular shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. The only shape that can cast a round shadow from every angle is a sphere. Aristotle knew that. They all knew it.
Too bad for Columbus, when he tried to sail to the Indies, he was using the Arabic measurement for the Earth which was too small. They should have listened to Eratosthenes. If I remember his measurement of the circumference of the earth was accurate to within like 10%. Not bad for a guy with two sticks and a shadow. Lol
They knew.
It’s seems some modern people forgot.
they all knew it ??? most people were lucky to survive. they didn't really care of the earth was round or flat.
sharehttps://www.fisica.net/relatividade/stephen_hawking_a_brief_history_of_time.pdf
As long ago as 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forwardshare
two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a Hat plate. First, he realized
that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth’s
shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had
been a flat disk, the shadow would have been elongated and elliptical, unless the eclipse always occurred at a
time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels that
the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since
the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to
someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent
position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance around the
earth was 400,000 stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200
yards, which would make Aristotle’s estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a
third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the
horizon, and only later see the hull?
Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in
circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the
center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in
the second century AD into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight
spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars, and the five planets known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus
The death blow to the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory came in 1609. In that year, Galileo started observing the night sky with a telescope, which had just been invented.
When he looked at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was accompanied by several small
satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did not have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought.
An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton
published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time
The Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a natural boundary.
This was all theoretical back then. Although they got it right. The earth being a sphere wasn't confirmed till the time of Magellan around 1500 CE.
sharemost people were lucky to survive. they didn't really care of the earth was round or flat.
i was just answering the original question. there were a few scholars from that time who cared and got it right but most people did not care.
shareprior to the printing press and moderately widespread literacy, much less primary education, it would be very hard for ideas to get around & be challenged.
prior to the rise of the university system in the late medieval era, there was really no institutional framework for science.
in the absence of these institutions, folks pretty much relied upon their immediate senses, whatever had been learned of farming and medicine thru trial & error. what science was done was performed by affluent tinkerers working in isolation, besotted by superstitions and biblical constraints in their thinking.
and since people were moving around on horseback pace, they took it for granted that the horizon was simply as far as could be seen with the eye. and who to challenge ? and how ? and where to publish their findings ?
its a very good indication of how important institutions are to human thought & culture.
If a person put a ball on a flat surface it would not roll off. The fact that a ball would not roll away when on the ground was probably evidence enough for the people of yore who didn't have our kind of free time to wonder how dumb their ancestors were for not having an information foundation.
Some also thought an eclipse was a dragon eating the sun. They beat drums to scare it away. Worked every time and thus proof. Similar things happen today but we pay groups of "scientists" to beat the drums we want. And everyone knows that scientists are honest, sagacious, immune to greed or corruption, and the big chiefs blessed with divine authority.