Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
the bottom line is what matters, not the objective truth. But media reports seldom give a critique or a detailed explanation of why 99.99 percent of the world doesn’t think the earth is flat.
The media had already created a fuss in 2008 when Sherri Shepherd of the morning talk show The View and reality TV personality Tila Tequila said that the earth is flat, or at least questioned the idea that the earth is round.1 (These same people espoused other discredited notions as well: Shepherd is a creationist, and Tila Tequila has preached a wide variety of controversial ideas, including neo-Nazi antisemitism). A number of prominent professional athletes, including Denver Nugget forward Wilson Chandler,2 Cleveland Cavalier (now Boston Celtic) guard Kyrie Irving,3 retired NBA center Shaquille O’Neal,4 and Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Stefon Diggs,5 also came out for the flat-earth notion in 2017 and 2018. Irving explained his thinking in the following words:
Is the world flat or round?—I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us…. Everything that was put in front of me, I had to be like, “Oh, this is all a facade.” Like, this is all something that they ultimately want me to believe in…. Question things, but even if an answer doesn’t come back, you’re perfectly fine with that, because you were never living in that particular truth. There’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.6
O’Neal is a famous prankster who loves to punk reporters with outrageous statements. He later admitted he was joking just to get a reaction out of people.7 Irving eventually retracted his statements and gave a public apology to America’s science teachers.8
The biggest public outrage was the reaction to statements made by rapper B.o.B., whose legal name is Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. B.o.B has advocated the full range of conspiracy theories, including the idea that the moon landing was a hoax, 9/11 was an inside job, the Illuminati are trying to establish a New World Order, Jews are secretly in control of everything, and the US government is actively cloning people. Not only did he start a Twitter war about his beliefs, but he upped the ante, getting into a rap battle with astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson,9 repeating all the usual debunked claims of flat-earthers, and even setting up a GoFundMe campaign to raise $200,000 for his own rocket to send up a satellite so that he could see for himself. Like most flat-earthers, he believes that everything from NASA is a hoax, so he wants to do it himself. The idea of sending his own rocket up would be laughable if it were not so sad, and it doesn’t consider the problem that even a cheap satellite launch costs about $62 million. Then he recorded and released a rap video called “Flatline,” expanding on his ideas, challenging Tyson directly, and even mentioning the noted Holocaust denier David Irving. Some of the lyrics include
Aye, Neil Tyson need to loosen up his vest.
They’ll probably write that man one hell of a check.
I see only good things on the horizon.
That’s probably why the horizon is always rising
Indoctrinated in a cult called science
And graduated to a club full of liars.10
Not to be outdone, Tyson wrote his own rap song, “Flat to Fact,” and his nephew, Stephen Tyson, rapped and recorded it. Some of the lyrics include
Very important that I clear this up.
You say that Neil’s vest is what he needs to loosen up?
The ignorance you’re spinning helps to keep people enslaved, I mean mentally.
All those strange clouds must be messing with your brain.
I think it’s very clear that Bobby didn’t read enough
And he’s believing all this conspiracy theory stuff.11
In March 2018, in a flat-earther stunt, motorcycle racer, daredevil, and limo driver “Mad” Mike Hughes launched his own homemade rocket almost 1,875 feet into the sky from a homemade launchpad near Amboy, California, on the floor of the Mojave Desert.12 His intention was to get high enough to see if the earth really looked curved from space, but at the elevation he reached, it would have been impossible to tell—and he was only in the sky for less than a minute in a violently vibrating rocket with a tiny window, after which he made a hard landing and sustained severe injuries.
Hughes told the Associated Press, “I don’t believe in science. I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust, but that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”13 Of course, if he really wanted to see the curvature of the earth from a high altitude, there are lots of safer ways, which are discussed at the end of the chapter, that would not risk his life and health. On February 22, 2020, Hughes paid the ultimate price for denying reality when his rocket crashed and killed him.
Hearing all this, most people shake their heads and wonder what has happened to our society and education system that the weirdest of all ideas is actively being debated in mainstream media and that someone as famous as Neil deGrasse Tyson feels it is worth his time to debunk it. Hasn’t the reality of the round earth been established since the time of Columbus? As Tyson tweeted, “Duude—to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”14
As astronomer and author Phil Plait wrote in 2008,
The world is filled with dumbosity, and it’s all we can do to fight it. But sometimes an idea is so ridiculous that you have to wonder if it’s a joke. Yeah, I mean the Flat Earthers. Can people in the 21st century really think the Earth is a flat disk, and not a sphere? When I see their claims I have to wonder if it’s an elaborate hoax, their attempt to poke a hornet’s nest just to see how reality-based people react. The media will sometimes talk to these goofballs, and I’m glad to report it’s almost always tongue-in-cheek, which is probably more than they deserve.15
Myths of Columbus
Actually, it’s a myth that most people in 1492 thought the earth was flat and that they scorned Columbus because he was convinced it was round. In fact, most educated people have known that the earth is round for at least 2,500 years. Ancient Greeks noticed that the earth cast a curved shadow on the moon during an eclipse. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato wrote that the creator “made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures.”16 Plato’s student Aristotle noticed that if he traveled north or south, it changed which stars he could see above him, and later astronomers discovered that if you traveled to the Southern Hemisphere, the constellations are entirely different.
About 200 BCE, the Hellenistic Greek scholar Eratosthenes famously estimated the circumference and diameter of the earth. He had heard stories that the sunlight shone vertically down into the bottom of a deep well only at high noon on the summer solstice in Syene, about two hundred kilometers south of Alexandria down the Nile River near the modern Aswan High Dam. By using a long rod to measure the length of its shadow and calculating the angle of the vertical rod with the sun overhead in Alexandria, he was able to measure the difference in the angles between Syene and Alexandria (fig. 2.1). Using simple geometry, he estimated the circumference of the earth to be about forty thousand kilometers. This is amazingly accurate, less than 0.16 percent off the value that we now accept.
Nor did the discoveries of the Greeks die with the “Dark Ages” and the loss of most of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Although some medieval scholars thought the earth was flat, most of them had read Plato and Aristotle and accepted their evidence that the earth was round. About 1250 CE, the medieval scholar John Sacrobosco wrote Treatise on a Sphere, with multiple proofs of the curvature of the earth. In it, he said,
That