Why did people think that the world was flat?

Question

Just curious.

Spellbound, I think it was Columbus who proved it.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Answer 1

Because looking at the horizon, it looks flat.

Answer 2

If all you had to go on was your own two eyes, and no superior knowledge from other people, it would seem flat to you too. It's not that people were stupid then, they just had not developed the technology and knowledge we have now.

Eventually people started to notice that you could see the tops of ships before you could see the rest, which indicated a curved surface to the water. This was dismissed as hills on land, and until ships became significantly tall it was not easy to see this fact.

Columbus did not first suggest the world was round, he just was the first to suggest that it might be easier to get to asia by going west. But really nobody knew what was out there yet. At least nobody in the 'old world'.

Answer 3

Today many things seem obvious ... like today we move with a plane in hours to the other side of the world ... at the time ... boats and horses were the fastest ways. Like cabal and lyss said, some people knew (supposed, believed) that the world was round, yet due to lack of information dissemination (no tv radio newpapers… few people speaking many languagues ) … not everybody knew or most people didn’t know. (at the time, before Gutenberg, almost nothing was written … these were the ages of darkness were knowledge was very limited)
Later the roundness of the world was questioned again, by the people from the “clergé” (catholic church), all this affair was finally nailed by Magellan who went round the world, and proved it.

Before Magellan, or a decent dissemination of information, people rely on what they see ... and they see a flat world around them. they cannot intuitively imagine it is round. Intuitively one imagines it is flat !!!
Sailors were afraid, when going to far, to fall into the waterfall of the end of the world !!!

Answer 4

If you didn't know any better, wouldn't you think so too? Go outside and look at the horizon. It doesn't look curved does it? It looks flat. The only reason that sounds preposterous to you is because you've been shown that the world is round. But, if you didn't know and just trusted what you saw, you'd think it was flat too. People didn't know about gravity. They just knew that when you put something on a flat table, it stayed there. When you put something on a spherical object, everything fell off. Since everything stayed put when on Earth, they figured the Earth must be flat. Also, if you look at the horizon, you only see to a certain point. It looks like the Earth just stops, like if you were to stand on top of a cube.

Answer 5

Your eyes hold the key, specifically, how high above ground they are located. From your point of view, eyes roughly 5 to 5-1/2 feet above the ground you stand on, the world IS flat. It takes climbing mountains so you can look out over the ocean to see curvature and the significance of that slight curve might not be readily apparent. Would a shepherd tending sheep and goats on a mountain overlooking that slight curve of the ocean on the horizon recognize the significance of what he was seeing? Especially when the only education he might have had if any, would be religious in nature, and we all know what they taught, that the Earth was the center of the universe until sometime after the trial of Galileo in which he was forced to recant his idea that the Sun was at the center or he would be tortured and maybe even killed for heresy in defying the statements of the Church on how things worked. The thing is, the Church KNEW Galileo was RIGHT when they forced him to recant. The Church's own astronomers knew, but the Church could not go back on the dogma they had been touting for hundreds of years. They could not afford to let it be known they could be wrong as they were afraid they would lose the faith of the masses who supported them. Where do you think all the money came from which built all those monster cathedrals, the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel? The surface of the ground I stand on IS flat, my Church tells me so, and without any education in science of any kind, I am not likely to suspect I am actually standing on the surface of a huge ball floating in open space in orbit about the sun which is just one of many billions just like it spread over an incomprehensible distance..

Galileo did not prove the Earth was round, but he suspected it was since he had seen Jupiter and 4 of the Jupiter moons in orbit around Jupiter. This is what gave him the idea that Copernicus was right and the Earth was not the center of everything. Only the sun being in the center could explain the retrograde (planets that at times apparently move backwards as our point of view on Earth causes us to pass ahead in our orbit) motion of the planets. Columbus did NOT prove anything about the Earth being round. If anyone did, it was the Portuguese coming around from the other side via Japan. BUt all they really proved was you could navigate a ship in the same direction and come back to where you started. We could have been living on a cone shaped Earth and sailed in a circle parallel to the base, so sailing east and eventually coming back to where I started proves nothing about the actual shape, it just limits the shapes available that it COULD be. It really took rockets and spaceflight to really PROVE the Earth was in fact a round ball floating in space. Until we could actually see it for real, it was just a theory. What's really cool is that spaceflight did on a bigger scale what that shepherd did by climbing the mountain, raised our eyes to a higher point of view.

Answer 6

Well, no one at that time went all around the world to prove it. On the map, it's flat so they thought the world was flat too and some travelers thought that they would fall into space if they sailed too far over the edge of the world.

That is, until someone proved it. But I forgot who, maybe Galileo?

Answer 7

Because the curve is so slight on the horizon that it looked flat. The first registered calculation of the curvature of the world was first determined around 240 BC by Eratosthenes

Answer 8

because of the way the map looked and pure stupidity back then they didnt have globes and they had only been to one part of the earth were they were born at edit:to answer spellbounds question that was magellan he sailed all the way around the world

Answer 9

I think it was just really uneducated people who thought this. Ptolemy knew that the world was round, he just missed the whole Americas thing. If you look at a map that he created you will see that he made the earth round, and divided it into 360degrees. I don't believe that there were actually any scientists who claimed that the world was flat.

Answer 10

Well if you look at the ground you walk on it looks flat only because your too small to see the curve, and lets not forget that at that point of time no one has ever been around the earth.