> Flat is just the limiting case of round as the radius approaches infinity. Reminds me a lot of Asimov's "The Relativity of Wrong": > Nowadays, of course, we

> Flat is just the limiting case of round as the radius approaches infinity. Reminds me a lot of Asimov's "The Relativity of Wrong": > Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-Earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the Earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-Earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long. [...] > The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat Earth to the spherical Earth. [...] > To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On Earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On Earth's oblate spheroidical surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile. > The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the Earth as sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the Earth as flat. -- Isaac Asimov, 1986 https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html