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Saturday, 1 October 2011

A world too round - Columbus and the Cardinals

"Starting a war on false pretenses is nothing new. But when a few nineteenth-century academicians declared a science-vs.-religion war, they did us all a disservice."

"There never was a flat earth dogma. When Columbus faced off with the Spanish cardinals, the issue was the size of the earth, not its shape. And the Cardinals were right: the earth was a heck of a lot bigger than Columbus believed. His mission was ill-conceived, and it failed. But it failed gloriously. Columbus went to his grave erroneously thinking he had bumped into some far corner of Asia."

Source.

Never realised Columbus had a face-off with any cardinals. But it seems there is a myth that people in the Middle Ages all thought the earth was flat. They didn't - as shown by QI and even this creationist website goes to a lot of trouble to prove the idea of a flat-earth is silly.

But I'm still a bit worried. If the world's not flat, why do people still fall off the edge when they try to go to Leighton Buzzard?

2 comments:

  1. That may all be correct, but I still think the French decision to go for a scrum in the final moments was rather rash.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Why do people still fall off the edge when they try to go to0 Leighton Buzzard"?
    The answer's in the question.
    Who, in their right mind, would try to go to Leighton Buzzard?

    ReplyDelete

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