Beckett also notes that the burgeoning movement speaks to how so-called social media "influencers" can now hold more sway than an expert in the field. ![]() You get a bunch of people around you who are constantly reaffirming your belief."ĭr. In this kind of environment, "it becomes really easy for once-fringe views to gain traction. "It's really about the power of knowledge, and that increasing distrust in what we once considered to be the gatekeepers of knowledge – like academics, scientific agencies, or the government," Dr. Jennifer Beckett, it's due to a general shift towards populism and a distrust in the views of experts and the mainstream media. Well, in part, according to School of Culture and Communication lecturer Dr. So why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is an "oblate spheroid" – a sphere that's squashed at its poles and swollen at the equator – is the flat-Earth movement gaining traction in the 21st century? The mathematician and astronomer assigned these coordinates to more than 8000 places across the known world. ![]() In 150 AD, Ptolemy's treatise Geographia laid out a revolutionary system of assigning co-ordinates, expressed in degrees of latitude and longitude, to locations around the world. "This gave him a figure that was very close to the actual circumference as we know it now." "From this, he concluded that the circumference of the Earth must be 50 times the distance between Syene and Alexandria," Ms Jayasuriya adds. If the Earth was actually flat, the angle would be identical in both places. He noted that on the 21st of June that year, in a town called Syene (near modern day Aswan), the reflection of the sun could be seen in a deep well, meaning that it was directly overhead.īut in Alexandria, around 800 kilometres away and almost directly north of Syene, at noon on the same day, the angle of the sun was about seven degrees – or one-50th of a circle. The first scientific estimates of the Earth's circumference were made by the Greek mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes in 240 BC. Greek philosophers established that the Earth was round as far back as the third century BC, but it wasn't until the 15th century that it became commonly accepted. "The further away from the village they travelled, the more hostile the environment became." They lived in a village that was the centre of their existence,'' she says. ![]() "Their view was egocentric and geocentric. Ships would sail off toward the horizon and often never return, and those people left behind didn't really have access to information outside of their communities. Once upon a time, it made sense for people to believe that the Earth was flat, says University of Melbourne cartographer Chandra Jayasuriya. So what's causing a renewed interest in something that's been scientifically disproven for the past two thousand years or more? What does it say about social media? And how did we actually establish that the world is round in the first place? And it has some high-profile supporters.įrom basketball players to musicians, rappers to TV hosts, a number of celebrities are jumping on the flat Earth bandwagon. Interest in most of these other far-fetched theories remains stable but the flat-Earth movement is growing, particularly in America. Although the idea the Earth is flat has been scientifically discredited, there seems to be a growing belief in the conspiracy theory.Īnd it's getting more traction than some of the other conspiracies out there, like chemtrails (which proposes that a plane's long-lasting condensation trail is actually made up of chemical or biological agent).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |