Myths and Misconceptions: Flat Earth
This week we’re taking a closer look at myths and misconceptions that have wedged their way into the zeitgeist.
We begin by examining a recent belief that encapsulates this moment in time better than anything: flat earth.
Let’s clarify a persistent belief about science first. Science is not a body of knowledge or even an authority. Science is a method, a technique used to probe the natural world by developing models of understanding whose value is measured by their ability to predict. To examine different beliefs this week, we’ll be applying the same set of tests to these alleged claims to see what the scientific method can teach us about not just the conclusions, but the way we reach those conclusions.
To get started with flat earth, we need to ask ourselves a few questions, starting with “what are we actually trying to find?”
You’ll probably already have noticed the glaring flaw in the flat earth claim, that it states a conclusion in the belief. Working backwards from a conclusion to supporting evidence is dangerous, it encourages you to cherry pick only the information that you both understand and perceive as supporting your argument.
A scientist’s goal is to be wrong. Scientists take their observations and form their best educated guess at how something might be explained, this is called a hypothesis. Every proposed hypothesis is rigorously tested over and over until we find the limits of its predictive powers, its range of accuracy beyond which we need newer or better information. And in order to test a hypothesis, an experiment has to be designed in a way that clearly demonstrates a successful prediction or a failed prediction, within a margin of specified error.
Back to flat earth. What we’re really asking is: what shape is the Earth? This question dates back to antiquity, when our best observations from exploring the surface of the Earth led us to believe that, to the best of our knowledge, Earth was flat. Eratosthenes is credited with devising the first experiment to test this claim in the second century BC.
Having noticed that on the day the Sun reached its highest elevation, shadows cast by poles would shrink to nothing, meaning the Sun was directly overhead in the sky. However reports from other Egyptian cities indicated that the shadows would shrink to a short distance, but never completely to zero length.
Eratosthenes hypothesized that perhaps the Earth’s surface was curved instead of flat, and to test this he set up an elaborate plan to measure the angular difference in shadow length on the summer solstice, when the Sun reaches its highest point. He made rough calculations about the circumference of the Earth, and calculated it to within 2% accuracy of the value we know today.
As for modern flat earthers revisiting a 2,000 year old problem, it’s much more of a case of psychology and groupthink than actual science. There’s lots of information online about the supposed “truth” behind the “globists” and their “agenda”, but even the most popular claims to back up their beliefs fall apart on even a cursory inspection. Simply put, these are more emotionally driven beliefs than actual serious experiments with any sort of scientific rigor.
Watch Carl Sagan explain Eratosthenes’ famous experiment here:
If you want to test these ideas for yourself, there’s ample discussion about the ‘flat earth’ you can find online. Carl Sagan also cautiously reminds us that “belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.”
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