And Yet The Earth Is Flat

One day the mailman brought me a letter from California. It said that the Earth was flat. What? Was I misled by my teachers? Was the idea of a round earth nothing but goverment propaganda? The Flat Earth Society's website proudly proclaims: "This site is not a joke." Members of the Society embrace the notion that the earth is shaped as a disk. But is not our planet a sphere? No, they reply. Just look around you: "The world looks flat." The existence of the Flat Earth Society displays the intrinsic tension between common observable experience and counter-intuitive evidence-based science. The ancient Greeks were already aware that the Earth was a round sphere, rather than a flat plain. Aristotle in the 4th century BCE correctly argued that the Earth had a globular shape, revealed through the eclipses of the Moon's convex shape that shows the spherical shadow of the Earth. A century later Eratosthenes, Chief Librarian of the Alexandria Library, even calculated the length of the equator. Assuming that he used the Olympic Stadia as units for distance measurement, Eratosthenes found the length of the Earth's circumference at a little over 25,000 miles, which is nearly correct. As a matter of fact, it is not very difficult to demonstrate the spherical shape of the Earth. From a sea shore, for instance, you can see approaching ships appearing out of nowhere as they emerge and rise in the horizon of the ocean, due to the roundness of the planet. Also, when you fly, at a cruising height of 35,000 feet in clear weather you can detect the curvature of the Earth on a cloud free horizon. However, people who believe in the flatness of the earth continue to cling to their belief in spite of all evidence to the contrary. When the President of the British Flat Earth Society was shown a satellite picture of the spherical earth, he examined the image and said unruffled: "It is easy to see how such a picture could fool the untrained eye." But perhaps we should be more forgiving. One could also view Flat Earthers as individuals who struggle To preserve their common sense, incorrigible romantics Who are trying to find sanity in a familiar world against the maddenning tide of postmodern angst and oversweeping technological pandemonium. If we ridicule the Flat Earth Society, why should not we Ridicule the Sunset Society, too? After all, the sun does not Go anywhere but stays at the center of the solar system, day Or night. What makes the sun apparently disappear from The sky is the rotation or turning motion of the earth. Although the sun continuosly shines on our planet, due to The rotation of the earth, it provides sunlight only to parts Of the world that face it. Thus after sunset night descends On part of the earth. Moreover, theoretically it is also possible to argue that if you believe that your ruler, or pencil, for example, is straight, you are wrong, because Due to the curvature of space absolutely straight lines do not exist. The world displays a great deal of intrinsic fuzziness. Nothing is completely black or white, but rather gray. And therefore one could plead that the belief in the Theory of Flat Earth is a fuzzy conjecture, just relatively wrong. Nothing is absolutely flat and nothing is absolutely spherical.