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Originally Posted by octothorp
I've wondered how many scientists prior to Pythagoras had actually seriously asked the question, 'what shape is the earth?' Were there earlier scientists who actually conducted experiments and arrived at the conclusion that the earth is flat?
If not, then you can't actually say that scientists prior to Pythagoras were wrong about the shape of the earth, simply that they hadn't asked that question in a scientific way.
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I think you're thinking of Eratosthenes, not Pythogras. From what I've read about Eratosthenes, it was known at the time that the earth was curved, but he was the first to (quite accurately) calculate the diameter, tilt, and distance from the sun. Simple observations of ships coming into land probably clued ancient people into the general shape of the land.
Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
I've always been fascinated by the history of maps and how ver wrong information makes it into maps, gets taken out, and gets put back in decades or even centuries later. California as an island, and a mythical arctic sea with a mountain at the north pole being two famous examples of this. Cartographers aren't exactly scientists in the strictest sense, but the similarity is that they make their own discrete discoveries and then attempt to show how that discovery fits into the larger base of knowledge, and in doing so they perpetuate ideas that have not been properly verified.
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One bit problem with historic cartography is that the mapmakers were rarely the ones doing the observations, they were relying on other people's maps and reports, and many explorers were notorious liars. I just got a reproduction of Lewis & Clark's official map after their expedition, and it is amazingly accurate where they actually went, not so much in areas where they were compiling other people's data.