The Flat Truth

Sarah Knapton writes:

In 1838, Samuel Rowbotham, an English inventor and flat-Earth proponent, conducted a bizarre experiment on a dead straight six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford River in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Rowbotham postulated that if the Earth really was round, he should be able to place a flag at one end of the uninterrupted watercourse and be unable to see it through a telescope as it would dip below the horizon.

To his delight, the flag remained visible, supporting his view that the world was indeed flat.

However, he had made a grave miscalculation. In January 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist, returned to the river and showed that the flag had been visible because of atmospheric refraction – a distorting effect that makes objects appear higher.

He carried out his own experiment, placing five posts much higher along the river to avoid refraction, and demonstrated that the middle post was slightly taller than those further downstream, as they fell away with the Earth’s curvature.

It is the same effect that makes ships’ masts visible for much longer after the hull has vanished over the horizon. If the Earth were flat, the ship would shrink uniformly as it headed into the distance.

Wallace’s experiment failed to convince the flat-Earthers, and to this day many still reject the scientific consensus of a spherical planet spinning at more than 1,000mph.

Some adherents believe the world is a disc with the Arctic Circle at the centre surrounded by land masses and with Antarctica at the edges. Others think it is a plain that goes on forever.

They argue that the horizon looks flat even if you climb 29,000ft to the top of Everest or travel in an aeroplane, and claim that water cannot stick to a curved surface, so the seas would simply pour away if they were on a globe.

To explain gravity, some claim that the flat Earth is accelerating upwards constantly, giving the effect of things being drawn backwards towards the surface, in the same way you feel heavier when going up in a lift.

At first glance their arguments appear to hold water, but dig a little deeper and their claims go down the plughole.

For a start, the Earth is vast and the curvature is so slight at that scale that it is imperceptible until you’re looking down from around 35,000ft.

Although planes can fly high enough, the curve is still incredibly subtle and requires a wide field of view that is generally not possible from a passenger window.

So if we can’t personally see it, how do we know that the Earth is round?

The idea of a spherical Earth is not a recent concept. Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle had come to the conclusion more than 2,000 years ago, after observing the Earth’s curved shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses.

Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, even calculated the circumference of the Earth in 240BC, based on the differing angles of the Sun at locations hundreds of miles apart.

By 1522, Ferdinand Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe, proving there was no edge of the world for ships to fall off.

However, it was not until 1930 that the curvature of the Earth was first pictured, when Capt Albert Stevens of the US army air corps took an aerial photograph over Argentina, clearly showing the horizon slightly bending.

Five years later, Capt Stevens took a high-altitude balloon 72,395ft in the air, capturing a more pronounced curve, and by 1946 the US had sent a missile with a camera attached about 65 miles up, giving us the first glimpse of Earth from space.

From the 1950s, satellites had started to send back the first images of Earth. By the following decade, humans were in space and able to witness the spherical planet in person.

Flat-Earthers will argue that the world’s space programmes are a giant conspiracy – ironically they sometimes term it a “global conspiracy” – yet in 2016, Oxford University calculated that such a conspiracy would have involved so many people that it would have been exposed within four years.

Even if you refuse to believe the decades of satellites, orbiters and astronauts from multiple competing space agencies, there are easy demonstrations that can be done from Earth that prove the planet is round.

A simple one is viewing large objects from far away, such as mountains. Their tops will always come into view before their bases.

The stars are another good indicator. From the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris, or the pole star, sits nearly exactly over the North Pole. Travel to the Southern Hemisphere, and it gradually sinks towards the horizon before it disappears completely. This effect is impossible on a flat Earth, as it would never be out of sight.

The movement of the constellations, arcing into view and then out again, is also only possible because the Earth is round and spinning while stars stay fixed in space.

Likewise, during a lunar eclipse the Earth passes between the sun and the Moon, casting a circular shadow on the Moon no matter where it is viewed on the planet.

“The ancient Greeks had a good handle on it,” said Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“The shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse – it’s round, ships disappear below the sea horizon, and the angle of stars like Polaris above the horizon varies with latitude.

“The angle of the sun in the sky at different latitudes was used by Eratosthenes to measure the circumference of the Earth 2,250 years ago.”

In 2018, Bob Knodel, a prominent flat-Earther, attempted to prove the Earth was not a spinning globe by setting up a highly precise gyroscope, which he expected to stay still.

In fact, the gyroscope drifted 15 degrees per hour, definitively demonstrating the Earth’s rotation. Mr Knodel speculated that “heavenly energies” may have intervened.

‘Their beliefs are not fact-based’

So how do you convince a flat-Earther? We asked Lee Mcintyre, a research fellow at Boston University and author of How to Talk to a Science Denier.

“It is nearly impossible to convince a flat-Earther with facts, because their beliefs are not fact-based in the first place,” he warns.

“Instead what I do is talk to them not about what they believe but why they believe it. I ask about their reasoning.

“The thing I’ve had the best luck with is to say ‘okay, so you claim your beliefs are based on evidence, right? So what evidence – if I had it in my back pocket – would convince you that you’re wrong?’

“And they can’t answer. That’s because they aren’t reasoning like scientists, who are willing to change their views when the facts change. Instead they are reasoning like ideologues, who will protect their identity-based beliefs with everything they’ve got.”

Verdict: Explicable

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Buy the book here.