Because I am getting on a flight today that will span many time zones, and I know I will need to deal with jet lag afterward, I spent a happy hour this morning reading all about Flat Earth theories. After all, if the world were not round like a ball, but rather “round like a plate” (as Imogene Coca once explained on “It’s About Time”), I wouldn’t need to worry about jet lag.
Once you start delving into Zetetic theories of our planet, you can read for hours. Not only is the Flat Earth Society alive and well, but it has all sorts of precedents that I found startling. For example, as late as 1605, it was universally accepted in Imperial China that the earth was flat, a belief dispelled only through the introduction, by Jesuits, of Western techniques of astronomy.
And reading this stuff reminds you of all sorts of things that you kind of knew, but hadn’t paid enough attention to. For example, although Pythagoras was saying as early as the 6th Century BC that the Earth is a sphere, it was the publication the Almagest by Ptolemy nearly seven centuries later that finally settled the issue for the ancient Greeks.
Maybe I will get over my jet lag by trying to read that.