Introduction

Abstract

Except for members of The Flat Earth Society, some orthodox religious and a few Indians in the Amazon forests, we all know or should know for sure that the earth is a sphere. Yet, in daily life we act as if the earth is flat. When we travel from one city to another, or from one country to another, we do not use a globe to find our way, but look on a two-dimensional map as if the earth were flat. The idea of a spherical earth is as counter-intuitive as the idea of the earth orbiting around the sun. Perhaps this is why we tend to think there cannot be a problem in understanding the world-picture of ancient people who did not know better than that they lived on a flat earth. However, when I ask people who consider themselves as educated, to place themselves in the position of cosmologists living in the time of Aristotle and to mention arguments for the sphericity of the earth without taking refuge to modern knowledge such as the circumnavigation of the earth and photographs of the earth in space taken by astronauts, they are most of the time unable to deliver more than just the argument of an approaching ship at sea, of which we first see the mast and only later the hull. When asked if they have seen this themselves, they often must confess that they have it from hearsay. Perhaps such experiences can make us somewhat more modest towards the ancients who thought that the earth was flat.