6 ms·

Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story

59 points by diodorus 10y ago

aetherson 10y ago
For anyone reading the comments before the article: this article is not principally about the banal fact that everyone knew that the Earth was round in Columbus' time, nor that Columbus underestimated the size of the Earth. It's about why the elites of Europe thought that a landmass like the Americas was impossible. Which was new to me and quite interesting.
- acqq 10y ago
  The main reason is not mentioned in the article but surely mentioned in the book: the models always tried to assume that whats written in the Bible is valid! As the Bible is "from God" and has "eternal truths" and it says nothing about the new continent, therefore it can't exist.
tpetricek 10y ago
The article made me think of a recent book "The Invention of Science" almost immediately - turns out the book is mentioned as one of the references - which is well worth reading if you found the article interesting. It discussed the story of the Earth in a lot more detail. It is fascinating to read how amazing conclusions people inferred by following perfectly sensible reasoning from basic assumptions they believed. It makes you think about the perfectly sensible reasoning we are using today and what our current ideas will seem completely silly in a few hundreds years!
- legodt 10y ago
  That book reminds me of the deep ties between the mythology of science and the mythology of Christianity. It is argued that thr truest way to be a Christian in the classic sense is to experience atheism as Christ did when he was on the cross doubting god and his purpose. I'm absolutely butchering this, but essentially, it is through that absolute test of faith that Christ is able to renew and solidify his faith. There can be no true connection with god without first fully doubting him. (I'm not Christian, so I apologize if I messed this up too bad, please correct me if I did). So with western science tradition, and through the scientific method, we are supposed to go through the same thing. Scienctific hypotheses and results are only validated through absolute doubt, and we only accept theories if they, despite exhaustive efforts, can not be disproved. Hopefully, through this method, there are things from today that seem completely silly, because that means some serious science kept happening!
- acqq 10y ago
  > It makes you think about the perfectly sensible reasoning we are using today and what our current ideas will seem completely silly in a few hundreds years! No, not in a way it was in the old times, at least not for the natural sciences, and the book you mention very specifically argues why: the "completely wrong" beliefs were possible before the "real" science, the later always just limited by our measurements. Therefore, Newton formulas aren't "completely wrong" even after Einstein, only not precise enough for the measurements that were achieved shortly before Einstein. The book in fact spends more chapters explaining exactly the difference between the really modern science and the status before.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    But Ptolemy's formula's aren't completely wrong, either: they're actually very effective at predicting the movements of the planets and stars — just not good enough, it turns out, and rather more complex than they need to be.
    - riffraff 10y ago
      This is an interesting thought. Not everything pre-scientific method is completely wrong, but many things look like they were, e.g. : * the idea that everything is made of (one of, or all) 4 elements * humorist theory of disease * belief in perpetual motion machines * spontaneous generation AFAICT all of these can be construed to be considered "good enough theories" but they generally fail to make accurate predictions, which "good science" doesn't.
      - acqq 10y ago
        I'd argue that even before the "good science" really established itself broadly (that is, before the last few hundred years in Europe) there were the results that have all the rights to be called "good science" and Ptolemy's formulas actually have all the right to be recognized as "good science." Note, the formulas, not the models that people believed, the "firm spheres and stuff": They made good prediction for where the planets are going to be. They covered all the known planets. They produced accurate results for all the observations of their time. It took the lifetime work of Brahe and his development of his own observatories to even collect enough data for Kepler to be able to recognize differences between the approximate circle paths of the planets. In short, just like Newton's, Ptolemy's formulas are a "good enough" approximation when knowing their limits. I've even read one scientist, and I tend to believe him, claiming that Ptolemy himself, during the development of his formulas, must have used the Sun-centric model, and then he produced the "projected" result which was more acceptable for everybody who just wanted to calculate where the planets are on the sky, as seen from the Earth.
a3n 10y ago
>It is well known that the great discoverer grossly underestimated the size of the earth: whereas most of the astronomers of his time accepted a figure very close to the real one, and based on Eratostenes measures in the 3rd century BC, Columbus thought it was much smaller, so that the distance from Spain to Japan crossing the Atlantic should be of around 3000 miles, instead of the approximately 12000 miles really separating them. Standard underestimation to get a government contract, after which it's too expensive to switch contractors after the underestimation is discovered.
- baddox 10y ago
  I don't know if it was pure selfishness, since wouldn't that error have meant that Columbus would know that he and his crew would starve on their ships?
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  He should have believed he was right because if he were wrong he would have believed he was sending himself on a suicide mission. It was only blind luck on his part that there happened to be another continent in the way.
  - goodcanadian 10y ago
    There is a theory that Columbus had information that there was indeed land at the distance of America which he possibly assumed to be Asia which led to his underestimate. Portuguese fishermen are the usually suggested source of this information. I don't know whether there is much evidence to support this theory, but there it is.
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      I would rule that theory unlikely. The underlying idea of the theory is that fishermen discovered the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland and incidentally discovered Newfoundland itself. When the Grand Banks was discovered is unclear--it was definitely known in the early 1500s, but that postdates John Cabot's discovery of Newfoundland in 1497. The usual claims of preemption seem to describe the date as "1400s". The biggest hole in the theory as described is that the nonpublication of the discovery is attributed to "fishermen keeping their new grounds secret," so why would they confide their secrets in a (rival) navigator? It also makes somewhat less sense that his voyages would have traveled in a southwesterly direction rather than a northwesterly direction if he knew that the land were to be found more to the north. There is no real evidence to substantiate that fishermen found the Grand Banks in the 1400s. The earliest claims seem to date to at best the 1580s or so and have a vein of "we totally knew about that place but somehow lost track of it until John Cabot found it again!" Given that the modern claims seem vague as to whose fisherman it was that actually found them (Bristol, Basque, and Portuguese have all been named), it seems more like an attempt to retroactively claim primacy. There's been no archaeological evidence on Newfoundland dating to the 15th century of any presence of cod fishermen--and given the knowledge that by the end of the 16th century the industry did produce a massive infrastructure on the coast, it seems unlikely that the lack of evidence is because we haven't looked hard enough.
nan0 10y ago
Off topic ,but was Columbus really the discoverer of America? Follow up article : "Why Christopher Columbus was the Perfect Icon for a New Nation looking for a Hero" http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-christopher-columbus-was-perfect-icon-new-nation-looking-hero-180956887/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-christopher-columb...
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
  I mean, of course not. There were people living here already. Then there were the vikings.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    He also never set foot on North American soil.
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      The Caribbean Islands are usually considered part of North America.
  - nickff 10y ago
    You can 'discover' a place or thing that other people already know about or populate. For instance, people often say they 'discovered' a new band or restaurant, and you can 'discover' a shipwreck or hidden tribe.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Columbus was a hipster. Clearly. Shipwrecks are only considered discovered if nobody knows exactly where they were. That's why the "discovery" of the HMS Terror was controversial: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/terror-discovery-franklin-expedition-more-questions-1.3793820 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/terror-discovery-frankli... Indigenous people had carried, through oral tradition, stories of a ship stuck in ice in precisely that place but were dismissed out of hand by investigators. It turns out they were right. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-arctic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wre... The place where they found that was, in the local tongue, a place called "Big Ship Here".

59 points by diodorus 10y ago

For anyone reading the comments before the article: this article is not principally about the banal fact that everyone knew that the Earth was round in Columbus' time, nor that Columbus underestimated the size of the Earth. It's about why the elites of Europe thought that a landmass like the Americas was impossible. Which was new to me and quite interesting.

acqq 10y ago
The main reason is not mentioned in the article but surely mentioned in the book: the models always tried to assume that whats written in the Bible is valid! As the Bible is "from God" and has "eternal truths" and it says nothing about the new continent, therefore it can't exist.

tpetricek 10y ago

The article made me think of a recent book "The Invention of Science" almost immediately - turns out the book is mentioned as one of the references - which is well worth reading if you found the article interesting. It discussed the story of the Earth in a lot more detail. It is fascinating to read how amazing conclusions people inferred by following perfectly sensible reasoning from basic assumptions they believed. It makes you think about the perfectly sensible reasoning we are using today and what our current ideas will seem completely silly in a few hundreds years!

legodt 10y ago
That book reminds me of the deep ties between the mythology of science and the mythology of Christianity. It is argued that thr truest way to be a Christian in the classic sense is to experience atheism as Christ did when he was on the cross doubting god and his purpose. I'm absolutely butchering this, but essentially, it is through that absolute test of faith that Christ is able to renew and solidify his faith. There can be no true connection with god without first fully doubting him. (I'm not Christian, so I apologize if I messed this up too bad, please correct me if I did). So with western science tradition, and through the scientific method, we are supposed to go through the same thing. Scienctific hypotheses and results are only validated through absolute doubt, and we only accept theories if they, despite exhaustive efforts, can not be disproved. Hopefully, through this method, there are things from today that seem completely silly, because that means some serious science kept happening!
acqq 10y ago
> It makes you think about the perfectly sensible reasoning we are using today and what our current ideas will seem completely silly in a few hundreds years! No, not in a way it was in the old times, at least not for the natural sciences, and the book you mention very specifically argues why: the "completely wrong" beliefs were possible before the "real" science, the later always just limited by our measurements. Therefore, Newton formulas aren't "completely wrong" even after Einstein, only not precise enough for the measurements that were achieved shortly before Einstein. The book in fact spends more chapters explaining exactly the difference between the really modern science and the status before.
- wtbob 10y ago
  But Ptolemy's formula's aren't completely wrong, either: they're actually very effective at predicting the movements of the planets and stars — just not good enough, it turns out, and rather more complex than they need to be.
  - riffraff 10y ago
    This is an interesting thought. Not everything pre-scientific method is completely wrong, but many things look like they were, e.g. : * the idea that everything is made of (one of, or all) 4 elements * humorist theory of disease * belief in perpetual motion machines * spontaneous generation AFAICT all of these can be construed to be considered "good enough theories" but they generally fail to make accurate predictions, which "good science" doesn't.
    - acqq 10y ago
      I'd argue that even before the "good science" really established itself broadly (that is, before the last few hundred years in Europe) there were the results that have all the rights to be called "good science" and Ptolemy's formulas actually have all the right to be recognized as "good science." Note, the formulas, not the models that people believed, the "firm spheres and stuff": They made good prediction for where the planets are going to be. They covered all the known planets. They produced accurate results for all the observations of their time. It took the lifetime work of Brahe and his development of his own observatories to even collect enough data for Kepler to be able to recognize differences between the approximate circle paths of the planets. In short, just like Newton's, Ptolemy's formulas are a "good enough" approximation when knowing their limits. I've even read one scientist, and I tend to believe him, claiming that Ptolemy himself, during the development of his formulas, must have used the Sun-centric model, and then he produced the "projected" result which was more acceptable for everybody who just wanted to calculate where the planets are on the sky, as seen from the Earth.

a3n 10y ago

>It is well known that the great discoverer grossly underestimated the size of the earth: whereas most of the astronomers of his time accepted a figure very close to the real one, and based on Eratostenes measures in the 3rd century BC, Columbus thought it was much smaller, so that the distance from Spain to Japan crossing the Atlantic should be of around 3000 miles, instead of the approximately 12000 miles really separating them. Standard underestimation to get a government contract, after which it's too expensive to switch contractors after the underestimation is discovered.

baddox 10y ago
I don't know if it was pure selfishness, since wouldn't that error have meant that Columbus would know that he and his crew would starve on their ships?
nerfhammer 10y ago
He should have believed he was right because if he were wrong he would have believed he was sending himself on a suicide mission. It was only blind luck on his part that there happened to be another continent in the way.
- goodcanadian 10y ago
  There is a theory that Columbus had information that there was indeed land at the distance of America which he possibly assumed to be Asia which led to his underestimate. Portuguese fishermen are the usually suggested source of this information. I don't know whether there is much evidence to support this theory, but there it is.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    I would rule that theory unlikely. The underlying idea of the theory is that fishermen discovered the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland and incidentally discovered Newfoundland itself. When the Grand Banks was discovered is unclear--it was definitely known in the early 1500s, but that postdates John Cabot's discovery of Newfoundland in 1497. The usual claims of preemption seem to describe the date as "1400s". The biggest hole in the theory as described is that the nonpublication of the discovery is attributed to "fishermen keeping their new grounds secret," so why would they confide their secrets in a (rival) navigator? It also makes somewhat less sense that his voyages would have traveled in a southwesterly direction rather than a northwesterly direction if he knew that the land were to be found more to the north. There is no real evidence to substantiate that fishermen found the Grand Banks in the 1400s. The earliest claims seem to date to at best the 1580s or so and have a vein of "we totally knew about that place but somehow lost track of it until John Cabot found it again!" Given that the modern claims seem vague as to whose fisherman it was that actually found them (Bristol, Basque, and Portuguese have all been named), it seems more like an attempt to retroactively claim primacy. There's been no archaeological evidence on Newfoundland dating to the 15th century of any presence of cod fishermen--and given the knowledge that by the end of the 16th century the industry did produce a massive infrastructure on the coast, it seems unlikely that the lack of evidence is because we haven't looked hard enough.

nan0 10y ago

Off topic ,but was Columbus really the discoverer of America? Follow up article : "Why Christopher Columbus was the Perfect Icon for a New Nation looking for a Hero" http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-christopher-columbus-was-perfect-icon-new-nation-looking-hero-180956887/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-christopher-columb...

dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
I mean, of course not. There were people living here already. Then there were the vikings.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  He also never set foot on North American soil.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    The Caribbean Islands are usually considered part of North America.
- nickff 10y ago
  You can 'discover' a place or thing that other people already know about or populate. For instance, people often say they 'discovered' a new band or restaurant, and you can 'discover' a shipwreck or hidden tribe.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Columbus was a hipster. Clearly. Shipwrecks are only considered discovered if nobody knows exactly where they were. That's why the "discovery" of the HMS Terror was controversial: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/terror-discovery-franklin-expedition-more-questions-1.3793820 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/terror-discovery-frankli... Indigenous people had carried, through oral tradition, stories of a ship stuck in ice in precisely that place but were dismissed out of hand by investigators. It turns out they were right. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-arctic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wre... The place where they found that was, in the local tongue, a place called "Big Ship Here".