Oh gods can we get any more off-topic *wink* [was Re: [Python-ideas] Inconsistencies]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Thu, 15 Sep 2016 03:43 am, Dale Marvin wrote:

> On 9/14/16 12:20 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Wednesday 14 September 2016 16:54, Rustom Mody wrote:
>>
>>> everything we know will be negated in 5-50-500 years
>>
>> I'm pretty sure that in 5, 50, 500 or even 5000 years, the sun will still
>> rise in the east, water will be wet, fire will burn, dogs will have
>> mammary glands and frogs[1] won't, and the square root of 100 will still
>> be 10.
>>
>> Isaac Asimov once wrote:
>>
>>     When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people
>>     thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think
>>     that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the
>>     earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put
>>     together.
> 
>> http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
>>
>> [1] Assuming that there are any frogs left by then.
>>
> 
> Funny, Asimov's professors must have taught him the same false history
> that I was taught at college. There's much evidence that medieval
> scholars did not believe the earth was flat.

I don't see Asimov referring to medieval scholars. The medieval period is
roughly around 1000 CE or thereabouts. Asimov talks about people believing
in a flat earth "In the early days of civilization" and goes on to discuss
how Greeks such as Aristotle (350 BCE) had evidence for a spherical earth.
He doesn't mention the medieval period at all.

If you're going to criticise Asimov, don't criticise him for wrongly
thinking that people in the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth. There's
no evidence of that in his essay.

Rather, criticise him for over-simplifying how quickly and universally the
idea of the spherical earth took over. Asimov jumps from Eratosthenes
(about a century after Aristotle, so around 250 BCE) to Newton (17th
century) with nary a mention of how long, slow and difficult it was for the
flat earth cosmology to be discarded. Regardless of what a few ivory-tower
Greek philosophers thought, in the early centuries CE many people still
believed the world was flat.

While it is true that by the Middle Ages educated scholars in Europe almost
certainly believed in a spherical world, not all people were educated
scholars. We have no idea what the average peasant tilling the fields would
have believed, although given the influence of Christianity and the
remnants of ancient Hebrew cosmology (flat earth) in the Bible, it is far
more likely that the average uneducated person believed in a flat earth.
But we don't really know for sure.

And there is more to the world than just Europe. In China, belief in a flat
earth cosmology was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.