[Buddha-l] flat earth?

[curt]

jkirk wrote:
>
> The Msulims translated a lot of ancient texts including Aristotle, and 
> they adopted the Ptomlemaic system of the geocentric earth. From 
> wikipedia.....
>
>  
>
>
A geocentric viewpoint is much harder to overcome that a "flat earth" 
viewpoint. Heliocentrism is very counterintuitive because of the 
universal experience of watching the sun move across the sky every day. 
But anyone who has ever been on even a large lake, let alone the Indian 
or Pacific Oceans, can directly, reproducibly and even somewhat 
quantitatively observe the curvature of the earth.

Highly intelligent people disagreed about heliocentrism vs. geocentrism 
until quite recently (by historical standards). But the earth's 
roundness was a settled matter well over 2000 years ago (precisely 
because it is more easily demonstrated), and only people who were 
seriously uneducated were unaware of this.

Anyone who bothers to make even the most cursory study of the history of 
science knows that no one has seriously believed that the earth is flat 
for a very long time - regardless of their religion. Only people who 
rely on Readers Digest, the writings of Stephen Batchelor, and similar 
sources for their understanding of the history of science believe in the 
tale that Columbus proved that the earth is round, and that before that 
everyone, or almost everyone, thought it was flat.

- Curt