Landsknecht Guild

I had this rather interesting article sent to me, its about the world being round and when people actually started accepting it. Its short, but still good.

From the Southworth Planetarium
              “The epitome of over-pleasant”

THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
April 21, 2010
Close to the Edge
by Jane Raeburn

The Earth is round. You know that. I know that. Weve seen the pictures.
But people didnt always know that. The idea of a flat earth, punctuated
only by the ups and downs of a landscape, was common in the ancient
world. In Mesopotamia, they believed the earth was a flat disk floating
in the ocean, rather like that slice of lime in your water glass
(provided you go to the nicer kind of restaurant). The ancient Hebrews
shared this view, and you can see hints of it in the book of Genesis.
However, the belief was rejected much earlier than you might think.
Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, declared the earth
was a sphere  not because of any scientific evidence, but because he
thought the sphere was the most perfect shape, and surely the gods would
have chosen no other. As it happens, of course, he was right, and his
view became well known and widely believed. Other Greek scholars
attempted to plot its circumference, and the Roman writer Macrobius in
the fourth century described the earth as a sphere of insignificant size
in a vast cosmos.
In India, a philosopher named Aryabhata made a remarkable calculation
of the earths circumference as early as the sixth century, coming within
1 percent of the actual value (40,075.02 kilometers, or 24,901 miles).
Early Muslims, motivated by the need to pray facing Mecca, invented the
field of spherical trigonometry so they could orient themselves and
their mosques in the correct direction.
By the medieval period, most Europeans understood the world to be
round, though they had varying notions of how that actually worked. One
common kind of medieval map depicts the habitable side of the round
earth, because its makers believed there was a torrid zone near the
equator that prevented people from reaching the other side of the globe.

In 1830, the writer Washington Irving, who did such a nice job with
headless horsemen and the like, created a biography of Christopher
Columbus that made up in liveliness what it lacked in accuracy. Among
the many mistakes he introduced was the idea that most people in
Columbus time believed the world was flat. This error persisted in
popular culture; for instance, on a 1961 comedy album by Stan Freberg,
King Ferdinand of Portugal sings of Columbus:
    Flat, flat world,
    Its a flat, flat world
    I insist its
flat as a welcoming mat
    And hes sailing off the end
    How
about our crazy Italian friend?
Today, a lonely few holdouts have organized themselves into the Flat
Earth Society, theorizing that the earth is a flat disc surrounded by an
ice wall we know as Antarctica. Besides providing occasional fodder for
parodists and talk-show hosts, they remain as proof that the strongest
science, the clearest evidence and the lasting contributions of scholars
cannot stand against the stubbornness of some human minds.