Flat Earth

Epic card · No. 11642

Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient societies subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography. The model has undergone a recent resurgence as a conspiracy theory in the 21st century. The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, the early Greek cosmological view of a flat Earth persisted among most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC). In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world. By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions. In contrast, ancient Chinese scholars consistently describe Earth as flat, and this perception remained unchanged until their encounters with Jesuit missionaries...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Orlando Ferguson, Public domain