:) I was very disappointed to find out that Newtonian mechanics were somewhat wrong, not in the details, but in that everything ought to be deterministic. Though I probably wasn't *that* little :)
I don't think I ever "believed it was flat", as such; rather, I'd just never thought about it. At some point (before I started at school) I learned it was round, and asked the usual questions about why people in Australia didn't fall off, but this was more a new bit of knowledge than a contradiction of an old bit of knowledge.
Matthew's the same. He asks about different countries and we always show him on a globe rather than an atlas, so he knows (at some level) that the earth is round.
There was a globe at home when I grew up. I remember being fascinated with it as a small child, though I can’t remember whether I thought the Earth was flat before I saw it.
As with geekette8 I don't think it was something I thought about one way or the other at an early age.
However, unless my memory is tricking me, once I found out that the Earth was round I did have a short period of thinking that we lived inside it (as on the inside surface of a shell) and wondering how they managed to get the rockets out of the Earth in order to travel to the Moon. (Although it apparently didn't occur to me to wonder why we could see the Moon in the sky.)
I can't remember. Flat sounds obvious, but it's as likely that my parents mentioned the roundness before I'd thought about it, and accepted that (as one does with many statements, obvious or not).
I don't remember any arguing about it. But it's conceivable, I'll see if Mum does :)
I think it takes quite a level of mental sophistication to think about the Earth (as a single entity, as opposed to the bits of it a child encounters). I wonder how many children actually form their own conception of what the Earth is and what shape it is, rather than being taught both the concept and the shape at the same time.
I do remember walking along the pavement at quite an early age and wondering if all the roads in the UK (well, the big island part of it) were linked, or whether there were streets which couldn't be reached eventually by walking along roads from our house. That's another way of looking at the world, and I'm pretty sure I came up with that one myself.
I'd agree that it's one of things that you don't think about. On a local level, it doesn't matter. According to Stephen Fry (the greatest living Englishman) on QI, it's been known that it wasn't flat for a Very Long Time.
Plato describes it as a sphere in Timaeus (although typically, this is because a sphere is the most perfect and uniform shape), and says it revolves ("And because for its revolution it needed no feet he created it without feet or legs"). I think Eratosthenes made a pretty good stab at calculating the diameter.
He did, but the earlier Greeks—Thales of Miletus and Anaximander, both dating from the early sixth century BCE—did not think that the world was round.
The real clinchers in evidence for a round Earth are the ships' masts becoming visible before the ships themselves; and the Earth casting a circular shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses, no matter what the orientation of the Earth with respect to the Moon. I wrote a story once (of which ewx may possibly have read an early version) narrated from the perspective of a flat-Earther in the time of Columbus (by which time everyone and his dog knew the Earth was round—even in the time of the Church Fathers, Cosmas Indicopleustes and Lactantius were laughed out the building for trying to revive flat-Earth cosmology), the narrator of which went to great lengths to explain these phenomena without recourse to a round-Earth cosmology.
To be fair though, Thales and Anaximander's cosmic theories were a bit... strange, even by pre-Socratic standards.
But I'm not sure about Babylonians or other early societies (but I bet Wikipedia knows!) - as you point out, seafaring nations might be the ones more likely to notice the phenomena that tell you the world is round.
Interesting comment today at women's forum conference, paraphrased. "There are two very silly schools of thought. 1) That the earth is flat. 2) That tummies should be flat." Apparently an awful lot of western women spend far too much of their time not breathing properly because they're busy pulling their tummies in all the time.
Just remembered something (although I have no idea where it came from):
Q: Why do people think that the sun revolves about the Earth? A: Because that's what it looks like. Q: So how would it look if it were the other way round?
Sounds like Wittgenstein, but I don't think that it was.
When my penguin bedside lamp broke and I chose one of those globes that shows physical features when off but political when illuminated as a replacement, it was clearly not a surprise to me that the world was round.
Indeed, I think I'd already been wondering why some of the larger maps in the atlas were made out of funny-shaped bits by that point. It's also actually pretty hard to see a ship disappear over the horizon without putting two and two together. (I've often wondered how people went millennia without noticing something fishy there; probably by not understanding optics.) I was reading Patrick Moore books by the age of six or seven.
So… I've spent my life immersed in the notion of the world's roundness. If I ever thought differently it would have to have been before the age of three.
Yes, I was so silly and believed the earth was flat as a little girl. When you just see everything from the bottom how does a little child know. I was told by my parents that is not the case. If that were the case we never have a sunset, sunrise and night.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 01:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 01:59 pm (UTC)Matthew's the same. He asks about different countries and we always show him on a globe rather than an atlas, so he knows (at some level) that the earth is round.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:11 pm (UTC)However, unless my memory is tricking me, once I found out that the Earth was round I did have a short period of thinking that we lived inside it (as on the inside surface of a shell) and wondering how they managed to get the rockets out of the Earth in order to travel to the Moon. (Although it apparently didn't occur to me to wonder why we could see the Moon in the sky.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:17 pm (UTC)I don't remember any arguing about it. But it's conceivable, I'll see if Mum does :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 08:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 02:41 pm (UTC)I do remember walking along the pavement at quite an early age and wondering if all the roads in the UK (well, the big island part of it) were linked, or whether there were streets which couldn't be reached eventually by walking along roads from our house. That's another way of looking at the world, and I'm pretty sure I came up with that one myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-16 07:06 pm (UTC)The real clinchers in evidence for a round Earth are the ships' masts becoming visible before the ships themselves; and the Earth casting a circular shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses, no matter what the orientation of the Earth with respect to the Moon. I wrote a story once (of which
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-17 03:09 pm (UTC)But I'm not sure about Babylonians or other early societies (but I bet Wikipedia knows!) - as you point out, seafaring nations might be the ones more likely to notice the phenomena that tell you the world is round.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 05:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 04:53 pm (UTC)Q: Why do people think that the sun revolves about the Earth?
A: Because that's what it looks like.
Q: So how would it look if it were the other way round?
Sounds like Wittgenstein, but I don't think that it was.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-15 06:14 pm (UTC)Indeed, I think I'd already been wondering why some of the larger maps in the atlas were made out of funny-shaped bits by that point. It's also actually pretty hard to see a ship disappear over the horizon without putting two and two together. (I've often wondered how people went millennia without noticing something fishy there; probably by not understanding optics.) I was reading Patrick Moore books by the age of six or seven.
So… I've spent my life immersed in the notion of the world's roundness. If I ever thought differently it would have to have been before the age of three.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-16 11:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-16 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-16 07:36 pm (UTC)