Hi Roger/All, > .... > computers, a certain Italian ship captain was told that he could not sail > west to India because everyone knew the earth was flat and that he would fall > off the edge. Although he didn't quite reach India, he did show that the > world extended much further than anyone imagined at that time and made it > possible for Magellan to circumnavigate the globe several years later.
> If you cannot contribute in a positive manner, I, for one, would appreciate > it if you would leave the list. Arachne digest is the only list I subscribe to, and I enjoy it very much. I don't know a lot about how such lists are controlled, but I sure hope that it is possible to somehow prevent access by this "Kavxxaka" person. Although we have had minor unplesantnesses before, we've never had to put up with this kind of ranting, in my opinion. Oh, by the way Roger: Columbus and all of his educated contemporaries knew perfectly well that the earth was a sphere, the only thing that was in dispute was it's diameter. Columbus was actually the dunce of his class because he thought that the earth was much smaller than it in fact is. Thus, he believed that the Orient was only about 3,000 miles west of Europe. Had he done his homework better, he would have discovered his error and realized that China was at least 3 times further away--and he would have never even tried to sail there! His speculations on the diameter of the earth were quite uneducated, because as far back as the ancient Greeks it was not only known that the world was round, but fairly accurate estimates of it's diameter had even been made by about 200 B.C. by a dude named Eratosthenes. The reason that Columbus had such a hard time getting financing for his adventure was not that the people of the day were ignorant or timid or closed minded, but rather it was that they realized that the Genoan was making some very unsound assumptions about the earth, and they were quite right. The 'discovery' of the New World was just one of many cases where humans have discovered things through error. It's funny how the 'sailing off the edge of the world' story refuses to die, though. Ray -- Arachne V1.66, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
