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Wikipedia Flat Earth History- Summary Post

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Wikipedia Flat Earth History- Summary Post

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This page deep dives into the history of the theory of flat earth. It talks about the origin of where and when people started believing that our Earth is flat. It states that the flat Earth theory is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earths shape. The article suggests that the myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue Catholic teachings. More importantly it talks about how there has been an increase of popularity with modern flat Earth societies and unaffiliated individuals using social media to spread awareness. One concept I found intriguing was that before a child’s learning environment is established they are vulnerable to false concepts of the Earth’s shape.

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Flat Earth map drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893. The map contains several references to biblical passages as well as various jabs at the "Globe Theory".

Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography. The model has undergone a recent resurgence as a conspiracy theory.

The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, most pre-Socratics (6th-5th century BC) retained the flat-Earth model. In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of the Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world. By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions.

It is a historical myth that medieval Europeans generally thought the Earth was flat. This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings. More recently, flat earth theory has seen an increase in popularity with modern flat Earth societies, and unaffiliated individuals using social media.. Despite the scientific facts and obvious effects of Earth's sphericity, pseudoscientific flat-Earth conspiracy theories prevail. Strangely, the youngest generation, raised with the internet, is the most skeptical of a spherical earth, with only 82% firmly believing the Earth is round.. However, a firm belief in a flat Earth is rare, with less than 2% acceptance in all age groups.

Belief in flat Earth

Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BC Babylonia

In early Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account from the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."

The Israelites also imagined the Earth to be a disc floating on water with an arched firmament above it that separated the Earth from the heavens. The sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars embedded in it.

Homer's description of the disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles with the encircling ocean is repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica (4th century AD), which continues the narration of the Trojan War.

Philosophers

Possible rendering of Anaximander's world map[28]

Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the world was flat: Thales (c. 550 BC) according to several sources, and Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460-370 BC) according to Aristotle.

Thales thought that the Earth floated in water like a log. It has been argued, however, that Thales actually believed in a spherical Earth. Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed that the Earth was a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it was the same distance from all things. Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the Earth is flat and rides on air; in the same way the Sun and the Moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness". Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC) thought that the Earth was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.

Belief in a flat Earth continued into the 5th century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was flat, and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.

Historians

Hecataeus of Miletus believed that the Earth was flat and surrounded by water. Herodotus in his ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world, yet most classicists agree that he still believed Earth was flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of the Earth.

Northern Europe

The ancient Norse and Germanic peoples believed in a flat-Earth cosmography with the Earth surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi, a world tree ( Yggdrasil), or pillar ( Irminsul) in the centre. In the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr. The Norse creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) states that during the creation of the Earth, an impassable sea was placed around it:

And Jafnhárr said: "Of the blood, which ran and welled forth freely out of his wounds, they made the sea, when they had formed and made firm the Earth together, and laid the sea in a ring round. about her; and it may well seem a hard thing to most men to cross over it."

The late Norse Konungs skuggsjá, on the other hand, explains Earth's shape as a sphere:

If you take a lighted candle and set it in a room, you may expect it to light up the entire interior, unless something should hinder, though the room be quite large. But if you take an apple and hang it close to the flame, so near that it is heated, the apple will darken nearly half the room or even more. However, if you hang the apple near the wall, it will not get hot; the candle will light up the whole house; and the shadow on the wall where the apple hangs will be scarcely half as large as the apple itself. From this you may infer that the Earth-circle is round like a ball and not equally near the sun at every point. But where the curved surface lies nearest the sun's path, there will the greatest heat be; and some of the lands that lie continuously under the unbroken rays cannot be inhabited.

In ancient China, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was flat and square, while the heavens were round, an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century. The English sinologist Cullen emphasizes the point that there was no concept of a round Earth in ancient Chinese astronomy:

Chinese thought on the form of the Earth remained almost unchanged from early times until the first contacts with modern science through the medium of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. While the heavens were variously described as being like an umbrella covering the Earth (the Kai Tian theory), or like a sphere surrounding it (the Hun Tian theory), or as being without substance while the heavenly bodies float freely (the Hsüan yeh theory), the Earth was at all times flat, although perhaps bulging up slightly.

Illustration based on that of a 12th-century Asian cosmographer

The heavens are like a hen's egg and as round as a crossbow bullet; the Earth is like the yolk of the egg, and lies in the centre.

This analogy with a curved egg led some modern historians, notably Joseph Needham, to conjecture that Chinese astronomers were, after all, aware of the Earth's sphericity. The egg reference, however, was rather meant to clarify the relative position of the flat Earth to the heavens:

In a passage of Zhang Heng's cosmogony not translated by Needham, Zhang himself says: "Heaven takes its body from the Yang, so it is round and in motion. Earth takes its body from the Yin, so it is flat and quiescent". The point of the egg analogy is simply to stress that the Earth is completely enclosed by Heaven, rather than merely covered from above as the Kai Tian describes. Chinese astronomers, many of them brilliant men by any standards, continued to think in flat-Earth terms until the seventeenth century; this surprising fact might be the starting-point for a re-examination of the apparent facility with which the idea of a spherical Earth found acceptance in fifth-century BC Greece.

Further examples cited by Needham supposed to demonstrate dissenting voices from the ancient Chinese consensus actually refer without exception to the Earth being square, not to it being flat. Accordingly, the 13th-century scholar Li Ye, who argued that the movements of the round heaven would be hindered by a square Earth, did not advocate a spherical Earth, but rather that its edge should be rounded off so as to be circular. However, Needham disagrees, affirming that Li Ye believed the Earth to be spherical, similar in shape to the heavens but much smaller. This was preconceived by the 4th-century scholar Yu Xi, who argued for the infinity of outer space surrounding the Earth and that the latter could be either square or round, in accordance to the shape of the heavens. When Chinese geographers of the 17th century, influenced by European cartography and astronomy, showed the Earth as a sphere that could be circumnavigated by sailing around the globe, they did so with formulaic terminology previously used by Zhang Heng to describe the spherical shape of the Sun and Moon (i.e. that they were as round as a crossbow bullet).

As noted in the book , in the 2nd century BC, Chinese astronomers effectively inverted Eratosthenes' calculation of the curvature of the Earth to calculate the height of the Sun above the Earth. By assuming the Earth was flat, they arrived at a distance of (approximately ). The Zhoubi Suanjing also discusses how to determine the distance of the Sun by measuring the length of noontime shadows at different latitudes, a method similar to Eratosthenes' measurement of the circumference of the Earth, but the Zhoubi Suanjing assumes that the Earth is flat.

Alternate or mixed theories

Greece: spherical Earth

Semi-circular shadow of Earth on the Moon during a partial lunar eclipse

Pythagoras in the 6th century BC and Parmenides in the 5th century BC stated that the Earth is spherical, and this view spread rapidly in the Greek world. Around 330 BC, Aristotle maintained on the basis of physical theory and observational evidence that the Earth was spherical, and reported an estimate of its circumference. The Earth's circumference was first determined around 240 BC by Eratosthenes. By the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy had derived his maps from a globe and developed the system of latitude, longitude, and climes. His was written in Greek and only translated into Latin in the 11th century from Arabic translations.

Lucretius (1st century BC) opposed the concept of a spherical Earth, because he considered that an infinite universe had no center towards which heavy bodies would tend. Thus, he thought the idea of animals walking around topsy-turvy under the Earth was absurd. By the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder was in a position to say that everyone agreed on the spherical shape of Earth, though disputes continued regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the ocean in a curved shape.

An image of Thorntonbank Wind Farm (near the Belgian coast) with the lower parts of the more distant towers increasingly hidden by the horizon, demonstrating the curvature of the Earth

The Vedic texts depict the cosmos in many ways. One of the earliest Indian cosmological texts pictures the Earth as one of a stack of flat disks.

In the Vedic texts, Dyaus (heaven) and Prithvi (Earth) are compared to wheels on an axle, yielding a flat model. They are also described as bowls or leather bags, yielding a concave model. According to Macdonell: "the conception of the Earth being a disc surrounded by an ocean does not appear in the Samhitas. But it was naturally regarded as circular, being compared with a wheel (10.89) and expressly called circular (parimandala) in the Shatapatha Brahmana."

By about the 5th century AD, the astronomy texts of South Asia, particularly of Aryabhata, assume a spherical Earth as they develop mathematical methods for quantitative astronomy for calendar and time keeping.

The medieval Indian texts called the Puranas describe the Earth as a flat-bottomed, circular disk with concentric oceans and continents. This general scheme is present not only in the Hindu cosmologies, but also in Buddhist and Jain cosmologies of South Asia. However, some Puranas include other models. The fifth canto of the Bhagavata Purana, for example, includes sections that describe the Earth both as flat and spherical.

Early Christian Church

During the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view continued to be widely held, with some notable exceptions. Athenagoras, an eastern Christian writing around the year 175 AD, said that the Earth was spherical. Methodius (c. 290 AD), an eastern Christian writing against "the theory of the Chaldeans and the Egyptians" said: "Let us first lay bare ... the theory of the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. They say that the circumference of the universe is likened to the turnings of a well-rounded globe, the Earth being a central point. They say that since its outline is spherical, ... the Earth should be the center of the universe, around which the heaven is whirling." Lactantius, a western Christian writer and advisor to the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, writing sometime between 304 and 313 AD, ridiculed the notion of and the philosophers who fancied that "the universe is round like a ball. They also thought that heaven revolves in accordance with the motion of the heavenly bodies. ... For that reason, they constructed brass globes, as though after the figure of the universe." Arnobius, another eastern Christian writing sometime around 305 AD, described the round Earth: "In the first place, indeed, the world itself is neither right nor left. It has neither upper nor lower regions, nor front nor back. For whatever is round and bounded on every side by the circumference of a solid sphere, has no beginning or end ..."

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the Earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.

Some historians do not view Augustine's scriptural commentaries as endorsing any particular cosmological model, endorsing instead the view that Augustine shared the common view of his contemporaries that the Earth is spherical, in line with his endorsement of science in De Genesi ad litteram. C. P. E. Nothaft, responding to writers like Leo Ferrari who described Augustine as endorsing a flat Earth, says that "...other recent writers on the subject treat Augustine's acceptance of the earth's spherical shape as a well-established fact".

Cosmas Indicopleustes' world view - flat Earth in a Tabernacle

Diodorus of Tarsus, a leading figure in the School of Antioch and mentor of John Chrysostom, may have argued for a flat Earth; however, Diodorus' opinion on the matter is known only from a later criticism. Chrysostom, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Eastern Church and Archbishop of Constantinople, explicitly espoused the idea, based on scripture, that the Earth floats miraculously on the water beneath the firmament.

Christian Topography (547) by the Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had traveled as far as Sri Lanka and the source of the Blue Nile, is now widely considered the most valuable geographical document of the early medieval age, although it received relatively little attention from contemporaries. In it, the author repeatedly expounds the doctrine that the universe consists of only two places, the Earth below the firmament and heaven above it. Carefully drawing on arguments from scripture, he describes the Earth as a rectangle, 400 days' journey long by 200 wide, surrounded by four oceans and enclosed by four massive walls which support the firmament. The spherical Earth theory is contemptuously dismissed as "pagan".

Severian, Bishop of Gabala ( d. 408), wrote that the Earth is flat and the Sun does not pass under it in the night, but "travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall". Basil of Caesarea (329-379) argued that the matter was theologically irrelevant.

Europe: Early Middle Ages

Early medieval Christian writers felt little urge to assume flatness of the Earth, though they had fuzzy impressions of the writings of Ptolemy and Aristotle, relying more on Pliny.

9th-century Macrobian cosmic diagram showing the sphere of the Earth at the center (globus terrae)

With the end of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe entered the Middle Ages with great difficulties that affected the continent's intellectual production. Most scientific treatises of classical antiquity (in Greek) were unavailable, leaving only simplified summaries and compilations. In contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire did not fall, and it preserved the learning. Still, many textbooks of the Early Middle Ages supported the sphericity of the Earth in the western part of Europe.

12th-century T and O map representing the inhabited world as described by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae (chapter 14, de terra et partibus)

Europe's view of the shape of the Earth in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages may be best expressed by the writings of early Christian scholars:

Bishop Isidore of Seville (560-636) taught in his widely read encyclopedia, the Etymologies, diverse views such as that the Earth "resembles a wheel" resembling Anaximander in language and the map that he provided. This was widely interpreted as referring to a disc-shaped Earth. An illustration from Isidore's De Natura Rerum shows the five zones of the Earth as adjacent circles. Some have concluded that he thought the Arctic and Antarctic zones were adjacent to each other. He did not admit the possibility of antipodes, which he took to mean people dwelling on the opposite side of the Earth, considering them legendary and noting that there was no evidence for their existence. Isidore's T and O map, which was seen as representing a small part of a spherical Earth, continued to be used by authors through the Middle Ages, e.g. the 9th-century bishop Rabanus Maurus, who compared the habitable part of the northern hemisphere ( Aristotle's northern temperate clime) with a wheel. At the same time, Isidore's works also gave the views of sphericity, for example, in chapter 28 of De Natura Rerum, Isidore claims that the Sun orbits the Earth and illuminates the other side when it is night on this side. See French translation of De Natura Rerum. In his other work Etymologies, there are also affirmations that the sphere of the sky has Earth in its center and the sky being equally distant on all sides. Other researchers have argued these points as well. "The work remained unsurpassed until the thirteenth century and was regarded as the summit of all knowledge. It became an essential part of European medieval culture. Soon after the invention of typography it appeared many times in print." However, "The Scholastics - later medieval philosophers, theologians, and scientists - were helped by the Arabic translators and commentaries, but they hardly needed to struggle against a flat-Earth legacy from the early middle ages (500-1050). Early medieval writers often had fuzzy and imprecise impressions of both Ptolemy and Aristotle and relied more on Pliny, but they felt (with one exception), little urge to assume flatness."

Isidore's portrayal of the five zones of the Earth

As for the perverse and sinful doctrine which he (Virgil) against God and his own soul has uttered - if it shall be clearly established that he professes belief in another world and other men existing beneath the Earth, or in (another) sun and moon there, thou art to hold a council, deprive him of his sacerdotal rank, and expel him from the Church.

Some authorities have suggested that the sphericity of the Earth was among the aspects of Vergilius's teachings that Boniface and Zachary considered objectionable. Others have considered this unlikely, and take the wording of Zachary's response to indicate at most an objection to belief in the existence of humans living in the antipodes. In any case, there is no record of any further action having been taken against Vergilius. He was later appointed bishop of Salzburg and was canonised in the 13th century.

12th-century depiction of a spherical Earth with the four seasons (book Liber Divinorum Operum by Hildegard of Bingen)

A possible non-literary but graphic indication that people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth (or perhaps the world) was a sphere is the use of the orb ( globus cruciger) in the regalia of many kingdoms and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is attested from the time of the Christian late-Roman emperor Theodosius II (423) throughout the Middle Ages; the Reichsapfel was used in 1191 at the coronation of emperor Henry VI. However the word orbis means "circle", and there is no record of a globe as a representation of the Earth since ancient times in the west until that of Martin Behaim in 1492. Additionally it could well be a representation of the entire "world" or cosmos.

A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth". However, the work of these intellectuals may not have had significant influence on public opinion, and it is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth if they considered the question at all.

Europe: Late Middle Ages

Picture from a 1550 edition of On the Sphere of the World, the most influential astronomy textbook of 13th-century Europe

Hermannus Contractus (1013-1054) was among the earliest Christian scholars to estimate the circumference of Earth with Eratosthenes' method. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the most widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, believed in a spherical Earth and took for granted that his readers also knew the Earth is round. Lectures in the medieval universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the Earth was a sphere.

Illustration of the spherical Earth in a 14th-century copy of L'Image du monde (c. 1246)

Jill Tattersall shows that in many vernacular works in 12th- and 13th-century French texts the Earth was considered "round like a table" rather than "round like an apple". She writes, "[I]n virtually all the examples quoted ... from epics and from non-'historical' romances (that is, works of a less learned character) the actual form of words used suggests strongly a circle rather than a sphere", though she notes that even in these works the language is ambiguous.

Portuguese navigation down and around the coast of Africa in the latter half of the 1400s gave wide-scale observational evidence for Earth's sphericity. In these explorations, the Sun's position moved more northward the further south the explorers travelled. Its position directly overhead at noon gave evidence for crossing the equator. These apparent solar motions in detail were more consistent with north-south curvature and a distant Sun, than with any flat-Earth explanation. The ultimate demonstration came when Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the first global circumnavigation in 1521. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few survivors of the voyage, recorded the loss of a day in the course of the voyage, giving evidence for east-west curvature.

Middle East: Islamic scholars

Prior to the introduction of Greek cosmology into the Islamic world, Muslims tended to view the Earth as flat, and Muslim traditionalists who rejected Greek philosophy continued to hold to this view later on while various theologians held opposing opinions. Beginning in the 10th century onwards, some Muslim traditionalists began to adopt the notion of a spherical Earth with the influence of Greek and Ptolemaic cosmology.

The Quran mentions that the Earth ( al-arḍ) was "spread out." Whether or not this implies a flat earth was debated by Muslims. Some modern historians believe the Quran saw the world as flat. On the other hand, the 12th-century commentary, the Tafsir al-Kabir (al-Razi) by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi argues that though this verse does describe a flat surface, it is limited in its application to local regions of the Earth which are roughly flat as opposed to the Earth as a whole. Others who would support a ball-shaped Earth included Ibn Hazm.

Ming Dynasty in China

A spherical terrestrial globe was introduced to Yuan-era Khanbaliq (i.e. Beijing) in 1267 by the Persian astronomer Jamal ad-Din, but it is not known to have made an impact on the traditional Chinese conception of the shape of the Earth. As late as 1595, an early Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, recorded that the Ming-dynasty Chinese say: "The Earth is flat and square, and the sky is a round canopy; they did not succeed in conceiving the possibility of the antipodes."

In the 17th century, the idea of a spherical Earth spread in China due to the influence of the Jesuits, who held high positions as astronomers at the imperial court. Matteo Ricci, in collaboration with Chinese cartographers and translator Li Zhizao, published the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu in 1602, the first Chinese world map based on European discoveries. The astronomical and geographical treatise Gezhicao () written in 1648 by Xiong Mingyu () explained that the Earth was spherical, not flat or square, and could be circumnavigated.

Myth of flat-Earth prevalence

In the 19th century, a historical myth arose which held that the predominant cosmological doctrine during the Middle Ages was that the Earth was flat. An early proponent of this myth was the American writer Washington Irving, who maintained that Christopher Columbus had to overcome the opposition of churchmen to gain sponsorship for his voyage of exploration. Later significant advocates of this view were John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who used it as a major element in their advocacy of the thesis that there was a long-lasting and essential conflict between science and religion. Some studies of the historical connections between science and religion have demonstrated that theories of their mutual antagonism ignore examples of their mutual support.

Subsequent studies of medieval science have shown that most scholars in the Middle Ages, including those read by Christopher Columbus, maintained that the Earth was spherical.

Modern flat Earth beliefs

Logo of the Flat Earth Society

In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy. Lady Elizabeth Blount established the Universal Zetetic Society in 1893, which published journals. In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society, better known as the "Flat Earth Society" from Dover, England, as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society.

In the Internet era, the availability of communications technology and social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have made it easy for individuals, famous or not, to spread disinformation and attract others to erroneous ideas, including that of the flat Earth.

Modern believers in a flat Earth face overwhelming publicly accessible evidence of Earth's sphericity. They also need to explain why governments, media outlets, schools, scientists, surveyors, airlines and other organizations accept that the world is spherical. To satisfy these tensions and maintain their beliefs, they generally embrace some form of conspiracy theory. In addition, believers tend to not trust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust, disagree with or accuse each other of being in league with conspiracies.

For young children who have not yet received information from their social environment, their own perception of their surroundings often leads to a false concept about the shape of the underground on the horizon. Many children think that the Earth ends there and that one can fall off the edge. The education they receive helps them to gradually change their false concept into a realist one of a spherical Earth.

References

Bibliography

Garwood, Christine (2007), Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Pan Books, ISBN 978-1-4050-4702-9

Hatcher, William E. (1908), John Jasper, New York, NY: Fleming Revell

Simek, Rudolf (1996) [1992]. Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus. Angela Hall (trans.). The Boydell Press. ISBN 9780851156088.

Plofker, Kim (2009). Mathematics in India. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691120676.

Randolph, Edwin Archer (1884), The Life of Rev. John Jasper, Pastor of Sixth Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Richmond, Va., from His Birth to the Present Time, with His Theory on the Rotation of the Sun, Richmond, VA: R.T. Hill & Co.

Further reading

Fraser, Raymond (2007). When The Earth Was Flat: Remembering Leonard Cohen, Alden Nowlan, the Flat Earth Society, the King James monarchy hoax, the Montreal Story Tellers and other curious matters. Black Moss Press, ISBN 978-0-88753-439-3

External links

Robbins, Stuart (May 1, 2012). "Episode 33: Flat Earth". Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast.

Robbins, Stuart (September 5, 2016). "Episode 145: Modern Flat Earth Theory, Part 1". Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast.

Robbins, Stuart (October 4, 2016). "Episode 149: Modern Flat Earth Thought, Part 2". Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast.

Power, Myles; James, James (October 31, 2016). "Episode 146: The Lies of the Sun". League of Nerds (YouTube). Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. - Review of a pro-Flat Earth documentary.

The Myth of the Flat Earth

The Myth of the Flat Universe

You say the earth is round? Prove it (from The Straight Dope)

Flat Earth Fallacy Archived 2001-04-29 at the Wayback Machine

Zetetic Astronomy, or Earth Not a Globe by Parallax (Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884)) at sacred-texts.com

Flat Earth idea of the Suns trajectory

Flat Earth Theory of the Moon & Sun's paths around the world

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Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography. The model has undergone a recent resurgence as a conspiracy theory. The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC).

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Flat Earthers : What They Believe and Why (Summary Post)

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Flat Earthers : What They Believe and Why (Summary Post)

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This article takes a looks why people believe in flat earth and where they are coming from. This article is mostly a transcript from a podcast, Scientific American’s Science Talk, run by Steve Mirsky. The main concept is that they are taking a look at why people are buying these ideas that aren’t backed up by evidence and find people who are promoting those ideas. They try to figure out if anything can be done to prevent people being misled or confused about these kind of things. The two men start getting into the little details of gravity, satellite images, Einstein theories, ect and how there was a limiting factor going on and that’s why when they cam across the Flat Earth theory it was still pretty small. One thing I found interesting was that even though there are proven facts against flat earth, they still believe that it is truly flat.

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This is Scientific American's Science Talk, posted on March 27, 2020. I'm Steve Mirsky. I'm going to let my guest introduce himself in a moment, because he does a better job than I could.

MM:

So I'm Michael Marshall and I'm the project director of the good thinking society, which is a charity based in the UK. Uh, the whole purpose of our charity is to promote science to challenge pseudoscience. So we'll do work, uh, to forward science education. And then another part of the, the work that we do, which is the bulk of my work, is to find ideas that aren't backed by evidence and find people who are promoting those ideas, find people who are buying into those ideas and to explore them and figure out if anything can be done to prevent people being confused by them, harmed by them misled by them in those kinds of things. So I spent a lot of my time looking at things like alternative cancer kills and the people who promote those and alternative medicine. I've spent a lot of my time going to see people who say they can talk the dead. Who say they can do faith healing.

And then another part of my, uh, my time is spent talking to people who believe in, uh, unusual ideas and who are kind of proponents of them. And that's how I came across the flat earth world, uh, is through my, uh, slightly odd, uh, hobby. Uh, at the time before I was working full time as a, as a skeptic, it was a hobby of mine to, um, be in rooms filled with people who disagree with me. To just understand what brings people to ideas that I would look at and say, well, this can't be true. These kinds of fringe and extreme and unusual beliefs. Um, what brings people to believe them and what kind of paths lead people there? What evidence supports, uh, supports their position in their minds and how do they engage with the world with that worldview and try and have conversations.

I've got a podcast where I talk to people who have kind of fringe beliefs and instead of having a conversation that a lot of people would have, if they are a skeptic about something and they're talking to a believer where you shout at them and tell them they're wrong and point out all the evidence and tell them, and it gets into quite a volatile discussion sometimes instead of that, I try and have a civil and polite chat to try and explore the gap between us. So I say, I don't believe in this idea of yours, but I'm really interested to figure out why I don't believe it and why you do so let's have a conversation. So I have these kinds of civil discussions and that's kind of how I came across a that the flat earth theory and the idea that there are people walking around today who think the world is flat.

SM:

It's really interesting and serendipitous that we're sitting here because I knew that there was some flat earthers out there and I just thought it was kind of strange and funny. And about a week ago, I discovered a friend of mine who is very well educated, she's got a doctorate in biochemistry and, uh, she has a sister who's also very intelligent and very well educated. And my friend told me that her sister is a flat earther and that her sister is very indignant about the, uh, idea that, um, we don't take them seriously. And she said something to the effect of, this is hearsay that we're getting from me right now. That, well, you know, if you looked at the evidence, then you'd know that what you've been told isn't true. So all of a sudden I became fascinated with the flat earth people and then just on Twitter and I hadn't, I had not been a follower of yours until I saw this tweet that somebody I follow must've retweeted a, that you had just given a talk in Edinburgh where I had been. And, uh, so I reached out to you and it turns out you live in Liverpool and here I am in Liverpool today. So, uh, that's why we're here talking. So tell me what do the flat earth people, uh, think and why do they think it?

MM:

So you've got to sort of unpack that question a little bit because it's very easy for us to see, uh, the flat earth movement as one singular cohesive movement. And that's how I first thought about it when I first came across it in 2013 and when I came across the flat earth society in the UK. And so I had a conversation with the vice president of the flat earth society. And I assumed, as you probably have in your mind, that people who believe the world is flat think that the world is a disc. And in the center you've got the Arctic circle, then you've got all the continents of the world sort of splayed out to fill the circle. And an Antarctica is like the edge of the disc. But what I found out that when I first spoke to the flatter society is that not everyone in the flat earth world has that version of the world in their heads.

Some do believe it's a disk, but others believe that, yes, there's Arctic circle in the middle and there's the land masses around it. And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions. That bisect reality, which is a really lovely idea.

SM: What does that mean?

MM: So it will go on in North, South, East, West, just go on forever and there is the above and the below, but there's no way of getting from the top to the bottom because it's just infinity of all ice in all directions forever. So there's no way of getting below the earth. And so this was a, when I first came across the flat earth moving in 2013 this was quite a vociferous debate that was going on.

And it was quite a schism really. And so they had the, the flat earth society at the time, it was largely a forum where they would bring forth their proofs of one version of this theory or another. And I also think there's another schism going on in the movement at the time, which is between one side, which are people who genuinely really believed the world was flat. And the other side, which absolutely did not believe it, but enjoy the intellectual pursuit of arguing a position they need to be false. And so they would find quite esoteric and off the wall proofs that most people wouldn't think of. And so when I first came across it in 2013 there were people waiting into these arguments who believed the world was round but had never thought about it before, but just assumed in a sort quite an arrogant way that they must know better than anybody who's ever thought about it and come to a different conclusion.

And so they were stomping into these arguments saying, well, what about photos of the earth from space and what about this? And what about ships going over the horizon thinking, well this is the gotcha, but not realizing that those were the first things they'd thought about, that they thought that the world, the approved worlds round. And therefore it's probably likely that the people who think the world is flat, I've had the same idea and yet they're still flat earthers, so at least in their mind they must have a good answer to that. That the people who believe the world was round having these arguments didn't have cause they'd never scrutinized the idea. They rejecting it. And so what was happening was I think to a degree, the part of the schism that were just having fun and knew very well the world wasn't flat, but just enjoyed the pursuit of doing that.

They were winning those arguments with people who were coming in and arrogantly assuming that they could answer everything. And in winning those arguments, they were really converting even more people who really believed it. And so you had this kind of effect where it was sort of spiral out of control a little bit, but I think it wasn't, it wasn't viral in the way that in 2013 as a in the way that it was in 2016 and 2017 and I think part of that is because that esoteric off the wall version of proofs can be quite complicated to get your head around. So for example, if you have the disk version, the world and the infinite plane version, both models suffer from an inability to explain gravity. You don't have a spherical mass, you don't have a central mass, you don't have a central point pulling it all to one point.

So it's very difficult to explain gravity in either one of those models. But these people who were doing kind of esoteric arguments were saying, well, what is gravity? Gravity is an accelerant, falls towards the ground, I think 9.8 meters per second squared, accelerates downwards. They said that is identical to a world in which the ground accelerates upwards to meet you. And so when you let go of something, it isn't that it's accelerating downwards, it's a, the ground's actually accelerating up to meet it.

SM: So it's a form of relativity.

MM: This is exactly where they come to. So people would then say, well, if it's, if the ground is the earth is, you know, an infinite plane in all directions that bisects reality and is accelerating upward at 9.8 meters per second squared and always has been since the Dawn of time, you'd hit a problem, which would be the speed of light.

You can't go fast. The speed of light. So people don't have a gotcha for this. And so the people who were putting forth esoteric off the wall trollish arguments would say, well, look at Einstein's theory of relativity as you approach Lightspeed, time itself slows down and the maths in their head works back out again. So yes, we're getting quicker, but time's getting slower and we can account for gravity in that way. And that's quite a complicated idea to get your head around. And so I think the fact that these people were winning arguments was getting, was converting some people to movement, but the way in which they were winning them were keeping people away from the movement because they were quite complex ideas. You couldn't stick them on a meme as you can these days. Here's a picture of the earth. You couldn't explain all that stuff about science, the relativity proven gravity and an infinite plane version of the world.

So I think there was a limiting factor going on and that's why when I first came across the flat earth movement, it was probably still pretty small, pretty unknown. I've been given talks about pseudoscience for the last kind of five, six plus years. And I've mentioned that I came across the flat earth movement and people would always say to me, there's nobody who actually believes that nobody actually, they don't really exist, that people are having fun. So it stayed quite small. And then in 2015 and 2016 a couple of things happened that really ignited a movement. And it was the publishing of two videos on YouTube or two video series on YouTube. Um, one I believe was, uh, Eric Dubay, 200 proofs. The earth is not spending globe. Uh, and the other was Mark Sargent's, uh, uh, 14 videos in his flat earth clues series.

SM: So now, we're going to actually be converting more people.

MM:

Well, it's, they are genuinely worth looking up because what I found really fascinating about the Eric Dubay 200 proofs, the are 200 of them in there, is that, uh, it was published in 2016 so it was three years after we had the, uh, infinite plane and the gravitational kind of explanation via Einstein's theory relative to, so it was three years of what you'd expect to be evolution and sophistication and, but in fact, proof number one, the horizon looks flat proof. Number two, even if you go up a mountain, the horizon looks flat. Proof number three, water, uh, cant stick to a curved surface. It always goes level and you can't get it. So there's no way it could stick to a ball. So they're all very, very simplistic arguments. And there's 200 of them. Um, some of them stick to sort of a pseudo physical properties. Others go to a conspiracy theory.

So I think proof 199 is saying that, well Isaac Newton and Neil Armstrong and Galileo, they were all Freemasons. Therefore the world is flat. And so you have this kind of a, this video and it was also published as a free ebook which collected lots of different so-called proofs of the world being flat that picked from lots of different genre of proof. So if you came to the flat earth, if you, if you were generally interested in conspiracy theory, you'd come to it and you'd find enough conspiracy theory reasons to believe the world is flat in there. If you came to it because you, uh, placed way too much emphasis on the, uh, the, the, your own powers of observation. You know, you can't show me the curve. I'm looking out at horizon. I can't see the curve. You can't tell me my eyes are wrong. If that's your, your style of thinking.

There were arguments in there for you that would tell you that that would support the idea of the world is flat. So I think it kind of covered all its bases a little bit. If you came from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, uh, in a biblical literalism the world is 6,000 years old and created in seven days as per the Bible, uh, which a large part of, of flat earth movement is actually crash creationism in a, in another guys. Um, there were creationist arguments in there that would support, uh, the, the, the idea of the world is flat. So it really did pull together different genre of flat earth arguments into one document. And I think that's why it became quite successful because it had a little bit in for anybody who might be, uh, in any way inclined to doubt the veracity of the round earth theory.

SM: That inclination is usually a preexisting condition.

MM:

I think so. I think so. So a lot of the way that people are stumped, we're coming across this information was through YouTube recommendations. Uh, this is, I think it was a study by the American Academy of sciences at their last kind of convention, which actually went there. The a scientist went along to the a U S flat earth convention and spoke to people there and asked, how did you get into the flat earth movement? And of the 40 people they asked, 39 of them said, I saw it recommended to me on YouTube. And the faulty of said, my son saw it, recommended to him on YouTube and pass it along to me. So it's what's appearing in that right-hand bar of up next on YouTube. So I think when there were people who were looking for moon landing denial videos, YouTube, once these Flat earth videos started getting out there and started having a sensationalist kind of style, so it'd have a sensationalist title, uh, there'd be people, people would come and watch it because they believed it.

Some people watch it cause they thought it was silly. Some people watched it because they wanted to scrutinize it on a point by point basis and watch it five times in a row to really get to the grips of every single argument. So they could write an article about how wrong it is. YouTube at the time said that it didn't say there's three distinct audiences with three distinct agendas. It says there's one audience of three times the size. So this is a pretty good video because loads of people are watching this all the way to the end. And so once YouTube saw that it started recommending it to people. So you'd be watching a video about moon landing denial and YouTube would say, I think someone who's a bit into moon landing denial might also be into the flat earth theory and it would float it there as a suggestion.

And if people clicked it, that solidified that link a little bit and the more people clicked it, the more that became solidified. And I think that's how a lot of people find their way in. And then it's because it became such a solid link. I think it even went beyond people who are already looking for conspiracy theory, uh, ideas. Um, you had people who'd be looking for videos of the, of the earth from space and they might see this video and then then they might watch it. And then that kind of strengthens those relationships. So YouTube had this kind of arguably accidental, I don't think they were deliberately doing it, but had this algorithm that was recommending sensationalist and extreme ideas regularly to people who were searching for things that weren't necessarily about that. And I think that did serve as a, as a recruitment tool and those two videos and the responses to those, those two videos and video series from Mark Sergeant, Eric Dubay, that really ignited a movement because I think they came around with just the right time or the wrong time in our perspective, uh, that it captured, uh, that YouTube algorithm in full flow.

SM:

Uh, so what do just, I'm interested specifically in the videos you say of, uh, the earth from space or the moon. What's the response? Those are all faked?

MM:

Yeah, pretty much. So, uh, I, I've, I've had lots of conversation with flat earthers and when you bring up those visual pieces of evidence, they'll say, well come on, you can't trust visual evidence. And they say photographs for example, you show me a photograph from of the, of the earth from space. I'll show you a composite job, I'll show you a Photoshop job, I'll show you a hoax. And they'll say that NASA even admits that those four photographs are composites, is that, will they are composites. But even if they are, composites, they're composites of what their comes into photos taken from space. It's just they're taken with a camera that isn't far enough away to get the entire earth and in one goal. But you're going to see snapshots of the earth and then you come, you compose those together because you've got a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object.

You're going to have to sort of stitch those together a little bit, but just cause it's a composite, it's gotta be it composed of something you're saying. It's a composite doesn't throw out the fact that this is actually a genuine photo as well. Um, and so they will talk a lot about how, uh, we can't trust NASA. That's a big, big part of it. NASA's part of the conspiracy, some lots of the flat earthers that I've met, I went along to the UKs flat earth convention and spent three days in a hotel in Birmingham with 160 flat earth, one of the most genuinely enjoyable weekends of my entire life. Really, really fun. Um, and I went there not to tell them they're wrong and not to be superior, but to really understand what brings people to that movement. Um, but what I heard lots of time was that well, NASA is evil.

NASA is a tool of the government, a tool of the Illuminati, a tool of the new world order. Um, they rely on their budgets so they need to keep that money rolling in, which is why they keep churning out material that suggest the world is round. Um, some people even believe that NASA is a tool of Satan. Uh, and they have all sorts of convoluted uh, explanations as to why that is. Uh, one of my favorite explanations was one of the speakers at the flat earth convention an Argentinian conspiracy theorist who said, we know for a fact that the UN is a front for the one world order because if you look at the Spanish name for the UN, it is the O N U and if you read that backwards it's U N O which is Spanish for one. And therefore we know for a fact the UN is a, a front for the one world order because the reverse name of it in Spanish is Spanish for one.

And my friend I was at the convention with leftover and said does he realize that UN is already French for one?

SM: That logic that numerology, when you connect the dots like that is so it's so intriguing.

MM: It is. And so they'll see that and they'll say, well, look at the, uh, look at the image, the logo of the U N and you have the flat earth, you have the Arctic circle in the middle, you have all the continents around it. And so let's say, why would the UN have the flat earth as their local? If it isn't true that the world is flat? And I had this conversation with the flat earther and I said, well, what else would you want the UN's logo to be? And it's, well you could, if the earth is really round, you'd show it from the side.

Okay, but then which countries are you not putting on? Do you want to show America and not Europe? Do you want to show the Northern hemisphere and not show Australia? Right? And so he said, well, okay, fine. So you show up from the top. But if that's the case, why isn't that Antarctica on the UN's logo, it's missing. And his idea for that is because Antarctica is either the disk around the edge or it's where the dome that surrounds the world is. And I said, well, Antarctica isn't a nation. This is the United nations. It isn't a nation. You know, there's good reasons. If you, if you sort of sense check these ideas, but if you're presented them in a way that says the U N is a front for the Illuminati and the one world order, and here's proof, look at their logo, therefore flat and you're not, then encouraged to sense check your ideas to uh, to look for ways to doubt yourself, to look for ways to disprove your theories rather than looking for evidence that proves them.

You end up in a place where all you're doing is confirming your ideas further and further and further. And this is what we see. We see it in our lives all the time and we're guilty of it all the time. But I think we're guilty of this. This is a movement that's specifically guilty of it.

SM: Does Heliocentrism hold and the other planets are flat disks or something as well or are they?

MM: yeah, it depends on who you talk. So it's not just that there's the disk version and the infinite plane version. There's actually lots of, there's a myriad of different versions of the, the flat earth and the universe beyond it. So some will believe that we're flat. But the universe around it is pretty much as is, that's quite a niche belief in the flat earth world. Um, some believe that, uh, many believe the sun isn't very far away, so it's very hard to, to uh, justify the solar system as conventional science would have it with a flat earth belief, especially a flat earth belief that may be rooted in creationism and therefore has this kind of earth as the center of everything kind of way.

And you know, the sun was created on, on one of the days after the earth, it was already created. And so some of that belief that instead of the sun being millions and millions of miles away, it's actually quite nearby and much smaller. And that's how they account for time differences across, uh, across the world. How you account for seasons, it's just that you're further away from the sun at that point. Um, others believe that the world is a disk, but it's under a dome. Um, which again goes back to the biblical idea of the firmament from and being the roof on top of the world. Um, one of the, one of the, the, uh, piece of evidence I've heard brought, uh, for that, uh, firmament idea for that domed theory. A idea was from Mark Sargent who said, uh, if you look at the gravestone of Werner Von Braun, so Von Braun, obviously the, uh, the, the Nazi scientist smuggled out of Germany after the second world war by operation paperclip installed towards the head of the U S space program. Um, his V2 rocket technology is partly responsible for, for America getting into it, getting to the moon first. Um, but if you look on his gravestone, it references Psalms 19 one. And if you look up Psalms 19 one, it reads, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. So it says Mark Sargent, why would the father of space exploration have on his gravestone a reference to the biblical roof on top of the world, if not a post deathbed confessional? Here's what of saying, there is a firmament and the only way to get me out of Germany was to go along with their hoax.

Now I would argue the reference is much more about the first bit of the heavens declare the glory of God for a man who saw his technology has been the key to the heavens. It was the, the way that men put mankind, unlocked the sky. Um, but if you're a flat earther or you see that gravestone, and this is proof then that there is a roof on top of the world and if you believe there's a roof on top of the world, then it starts to ask questions about what is space beyond it. And so I spoke to Mark Sergeant about this and he said, well, the sun or moon is still there, but they're much closer and they're separate bodies with their own separate light sources. And the way we know that, he said, it's because sunlight is warm and Moonlight is cold. And I said, what do you mean by that?

He said, well, sunlight, obviously warms you. He said, yeah, that wasn't a bit undisputed. Uh, he said, Moonlight. He said, if you go out in the night with a thermometer and you put that in shadow and take a temperature reading, and then you move it away from the shadow into the open clearing and then take a temperature reading, the temperature drops. And that's because the Moonlight is cooling the thermometer down. Well, what's actually happening is your first temperature reading is in shadow and therefore in a shaded area. And then to get into Moonlight, you have to move it out of a shaded area and expose it to whatever, whatever other winds and things you have. And that's a, that's the reason for it. Um, and so when, my favorite things about Mark Sargent's theory actually is that like many flat earthers, he was a conspiracy theorist who believed in all sorts of conspiracies beforehand.

So, uh, JFK was assassinated by the government or by an insight. It was an inside job. The moon landing was never real. Uh, he believed there was a civilization used to live on Mars who carved a face on a rock on Mars. All the, all the kind of classic stuff. And so when I spoke to Mark, I thought one of the ways to try and understand, um, what counts as a standard of evidence and how do you sense check? I thought I'd ask him, was there ever a conspiracy theory that you used to believe in that you now no longer believed to be true? And I thought maybe this will help me understand where you can come back from an idea. He said, well, it's funny because I used to, he said, I used to always wonder why are all these different conspiracies true? And then I realized the world is flat.

It all made sense because I thought, why did the government killed JFK? It's because they knew that we couldn't get to the moon. So the moon landing had to be faked because you can't get past the firmament because the world is flat and under a dome. So he said it was like, um, the, uh, the, the flat earth is kind of the Rosetta stone of conspiracy theories to a degree. It makes all the rest of it make sense. But he said there's one thing that no longer makes sense to me because I no longer believe that there's a face on Mars. And I want to meet the guy who came up with that cause I really want to know who's behind him. And I said, yeah, that's cause you no longer believe in Mars. That's cause you believe that the planets and the stars are just projections on the dorm. So you have a different view of the universe depending on what version of a, of the flat earth you, uh, you believe in. What are some of the,

um, most popular, um, Co conspiracy theories? You know, the, the flat earthers also believe in, are they anti vacs predominantly?

Yeah. So this is where I think it gets quite important for me because, uh, when I spent time at the, at the, the flat earth convention, when I've talked to flat earthers and then talk to people who are, you know, scientists and skeptics about it, they all say, well, at least the flat earth is harmless. And I think the problem is, uh, the flat earth beliefs don't exist in isolation. So one of things that really surprised me actually at the, at the convention that I went to was how little material was about the flat earth. So the Argentinian, uh, conspiracy theorist that was presenting that I mentioned before, he was talking not only was the a one world order and Illuminati that was, you know, run by Satan and, and various of the tools of Satan. But he was also pointing out how dinosaurs were faked and how it was a, the dinosaurs were invented by an artist who looked at, who looked at our giraffes and rhinos and crocodiles and sort of mixed the three together to create dinosaurs. But he also said, if you want to know who's really got the, what's really going on behind the world, read the book, the protocols of the elders of Zion and that will tell you what's going on. And

SM:

there you go. Now, now you're really at the end. One of the good roots.

MM:

Totally. And what surprised me was I was shocked to hear this hugely influential antisemitic hoax document. Uh, the protocols, elders designer, a fake that was created to stir antisemitism. I was shocked to hear that brought up on stage at this convention where I was expecting to hear about the flat earth, but I think I was the only one who was shocked. No one else seemed to bat an eyelid. And so we do see these different conspiracy theories clustering together. And uh, I spoke to a journalist actually at the, at the convention that weekend and they were having a lovely old time interviewing people saying, Oh, isn't this fun? Isn't it silly? Said, well, it is fun, but if you really want to know what's going on, just see that couple over there with the baby. Ask them if the baby's vaccinated, ask them in that baby was ill tomorrow.

Would they go and see a doctor or would they believe that big pharma is a tool of oppression and evil and moneymaking, all this kind of stuff. You know, one of the speakers at the convention, as well as being a flat earther and as well as being a nine 11 truther also believes that you can cure all manner of diseases, including HIV and AIDS by drinking or injecting your own urine. And this is, these are ideas, these are the ideas that are sort of bedfellows. And so I think a flat earth is in some ways, it's just the most visible of a, an ecosystem of conspiracy theory. Uh, and I think if you really want to try and, uh, help people challenge their own beliefs in the flat earth, you have to see it as such. You can't see it in isolation. You have to try and look at the, the wider pattern that it fits within.

SM:

Uh, this is so fascinating. Um, and you're obviously a tremendous talker. So why don't you, why don't you promote your podcast.

MM:

I've got a couple of things that I do, but the one in which I talk to people who, uh, who put forward ideas that I disagree with is called be reasonable with the idea being that I'm there to be reasonable to put forward a reasonable face to it. And so, um, I've talked to all manner of people from people who believe the world is flat to people who believe the world is hollow. I wish that's a really interesting interview because that goes in places in, in, in the same way that you might not associate, uh, antisemitic hoaxes with the flat earth belief. The hollow earth belief goes into some of the key risk positions too. And that's well worth the listen. Um, and I've interviewed people who believe they can talk to the dead and, and many of the things like that. But I've also interviewed people who are promoting, uh, the drinking of bleach as a cure for cancer, uh, and people who are putting forward white supremacists beliefs, uh, anti-feminist beliefs and some pretty extreme positions.

And the, the, the idea of the show really is to kind of understand the way we as people structure our beliefs. Cause I think the structuring of belief is very, uh, is very similar. The details of the beliefs change. And I think that flat earth is a, is a great way of examining the, the, the nature of belief, um, untainted by the possibility that it might be true. And then once you, once you really examine that and understand that once you've understood that the factors that influence people's beliefs, you can sort of lift that entire framework up and then lay it over some of these other beliefs that are much harder to point to a single fact that disproves it. So I think, yeah, understanding people who hold fringe or extreme positions is a useful thing. If we want to try and limit their influence and bring people back to a more reasonable position.

SM:

And, of course, bleach is back in the news, as some people have been recommending it as an anti-coronavirus gargle. Do not, under any circumstances, do that.

That's it for this episode, get your science news at our website, www.scientificamerican.com. Where all of our coronavirus coverage is out from behind the paywall, available free.

And follow us on Twitter, where you'll get a tweet whenever a new item hits the website. Our twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American's Science Talk, I'm Steve Mirsky, thanks for clicking on us.

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Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why

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Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society in the U.K., talks about flat earth belief and its relationship to conspiracy theories and other antiscience activities.

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Synthesis Post - (Flat Earthers: What they Believe and Why) & (Are Flat Earthers Being Serious?)

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Synthesis Post - (Flat Earthers: What they Believe and Why) & (Are Flat Earthers Being Serious?)

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Both these articles talk about similar ideas but in different ways. They both argue that people who believe the Earth is flat are wrong. They also take a look at why they believe this and what it is doing to them.

The article on what they believe and why focuses on why they believe such things. It supports the idea that Flat-Earthers are wrong and the earth is indeed not flat. Steve Mirsky, who ran this podcast was a writer from Scientific American and a host for science podcasts.

The next article on are they actually being serious about believing that the Earth is flat was written by Stephanie Pappas. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.

Both sources agree on the same idea, that earth is not flat. Taking information from various resouces, they talk about two different aspects but in the end, agree on one thing. The Earth is not flat.

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This article by Stephanie Papas, published in 2012 but updated in more recent years, takes a stand against the Flat Earth theory.

Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering a range of topics. She now works as freelancer based in Denver, Colorado and regularly contributes to Scientific American and other monthly magazines. She has a bachelor’s in psychology from University of South Carolina. In many of her articles she uses credible sources such as many profesores from different colleges.

One reason why I stand with her ideas on this theory is that she is using many different credible sources information such as NASA. She even consults with other profesor such as Karen Douglas, a profesor at University of Kent.

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Flat earthers believe one of the most curious conspiracy theories on the internet. Here's a look at what they believe and why.

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This article written in 2019 by Rob Picheta, takes perspectives from people who believe that the Earth and analyzes them. Ultimate this article was published on CNN which is a very credible sources as they have over 4,000 news professionals.

Ultimately you should trust his information as this source and writer are very credible. CNN is one of the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery. CNN is ranked #10 among all cable networks.

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The flat-Earth conspiracy is spreading around the globe. Does it hide a darker core? | CNN

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“I don’t want to be a flat Earther,” David Weiss says, his voice weary as he reflects on his personal awakening. “Would you wake up in the morning and want everyone to think you’re an idiot?”