The Flat Earth Society was quick to respond. "Someone must have been to the edge and checked by now, surely!" "I'd like to see a picture of the edge of the Earth, could one of you guys upload one?" wrote one sceptic. There are 150,000 followers of the Flat Earth Society on Facebook.īut in spite of that big number, it seems the vast majority of them are detractors.Īnd the society are active in replying to pointed questions with scientific (or pseudoscientific) explanations. It is a myth that people actually believed the world was flat. Well before Magellan proved a spherical Earth by circumnavigating it, the established belief was that the world was round. He was motivated to find a shortcut to the East Indies to buy spices. (A Renaissance painting depicting a spherical Earth.)Īnd Christopher Columbus didn't set sail to prove the Earth was round. Dante wrote of a spherical world in his Divine Comedy in the 14 th century. Iranian astronomer Jamal-al-Din presented a terrestrial globe to the court of Kublai Khan in 1267. Swiss theologians, Persian mathematicians, Armenian philosophers and French scholars all wrote about a spherical world in the Dark Ages.Įnglish monk Bede the Venerable wrote of a round Earth in the 7 th century. So why did people think the Earth was flat?Īs it turns out, there was never truly a time when the general consensus was of a flat Earth. Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle also wrote about it, as did Indian astronomers Brahmagupta and Varahamihira. Pythagoras gets much of the credit in the sixth century BC for concluding the Earth was a sphere. Readers may ask if the topic of a flat Earth was debunked by Christopher Columbus and Magellan.īut the truth is humanity has known the Earth was round for millennia. Irving said he found out about the flat Earth theory by watching Instagram videos. "For what I've known for as many years and what I've been taught is that the earth is round, but I mean if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that - can you really think of us rotating around the sun, and all planets align, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these 'planets' and stuff like this?" "Is the earth flat or round? - I think you need to do research on it," Irving said in 2016.
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