Five Historical Misconceptions...Clever, Amusing Video

[Selene]

Clever video:

Five historical misconceptions:

[BaalChatzaf]

Clever video:Five historical misconceptions:

Wonderful! Perhaps you have seen the comedian Robert Wuhl hold forth on historical falsehood. One of his favorite is how the author Washington Irving (He of Rip Van Winkle fame) created the round earth Columbus versus the flat-earth everyone else. Anyone who lived near the sea when people sailed out of sight from the land would know the earth is round. Wuhl built a comedy routine on HBO on the premise that when fact and myth collide push the myth.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Clever video:Five historical misconceptions:

Wonderful! Perhaps you have seen the comedian Robert Wuhl hold forth on historical falsehood. One of his favorite is how the author Washington Irving (He of Rip Van Winkle fame) created the round earth Columbus versus the flat-earth everyone else. Anyone who lived near the sea when people sailed out of sight from the land would know the earth is round. Wuhl built a comedy routine on HBO on the premise that when fact and myth collide push the myth.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Disappearing over the horizon may only be disappearing from sight because of sight limitation not the curvature of the earth. In fact you need to be at about 100,000 feet to see the earth's curvature. I suspect the disappearing ships would have undisappeared by putting a telescope to one's eye. You're right about the myth, regardless.

--Brant

I think you'd need more than a ship disappearing--you'd also need to see the horizon as curved instead of flat

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think you'd need more than a ship disappearing--you'd also need to see the horizon as curved instead of flat

You can clearly see the water as curving over the semi-circle of the horizon if you have an unobstructed view across a calm expanse of water.

I was fascinated to be able to see the curve from a beach club on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico near Boca Grande, Florida. This was in May 2007, when Larry and I were in Boca Grande for his sister's memorial ceremony and some of the family went for breakfast one day to the beach club. The weather was spakling clear; the water was calm, an incredibly vivid blue expanse. The horizon semi-circle of the water looked like it was curving downward away from the viewer.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

Clever video:Five historical misconceptions:

Wonderful! Perhaps you have seen the comedian Robert Wuhl hold forth on historical falsehood. One of his favorite is how the author Washington Irving (He of Rip Van Winkle fame) created the round earth Columbus versus the flat-earth everyone else. Anyone who lived near the sea when people sailed out of sight from the land would know the earth is round. Wuhl built a comedy routine on HBO on the premise that when fact and myth collide push the myth.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Disappearing over the horizon may only be disappearing from sight because of sight limitation not the curvature of the earth. In fact you need to be at about 100,000 feet to see the earth's curvature. I suspect the disappearing ships would have undisappeared by putting a telescope to one's eye. You're right about the myth, regardless.

--Brant

I think you'd need more than a ship disappearing--you'd also need to see the horizon as curved instead of flat

When the ship disappears over the horizon first the hull disappears then the masts. When the ship appears at the horizon first you see the masts then the hull. From this you can infer a curvature.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

As I wrote: "The average person in Hellenic and Roman times knew that our

world is round. Th philosophic inquiries and dialogs that began

with Thales reached their peak with Aristotle. Later, various

hellenistic astronomers made measurements of the size of the

Earth and the sizes of and distances to the Sun and Moon.

Several schemes for explaining the motions of the planets were

invented. Generally, the average person of those times did not

believe Earth to be flat any more than the average person of our

day believes that we are alone in the galaxy."

http://www.1worldglobes.com/ancientcoinsarticle.htm

As discussed here, also, in Medieval Europe, astrologers computed the distances to the planets (including Sun and Moon), and to the sphere of the stars. They calculated Easter hundreds of years into the future, and - finding their predictions wrong decades later - corrected their models. The astrolabe of the Arabs was a hot import item.