The Globe
How the Earth Became Round
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
A New Scientist Best Book of 2023
From Babylon to Columbus and beyond, a journey across millennia and—yes—the globe exploring how we came to understand our spherical planet.
The Globe tells the story of humanity’s quest to discover the form of the world: that the Earth is round and not flat. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, from where it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter, but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that Earth is a ball. However, it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken. An accessible challenge to long-established beliefs about the history of ideas, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered the first great scientific achievement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fascinating chronicle by historian Hannam (The Genesis of Science) traces how humanity's understanding of Earth's shape has changed over millennia. He notes that 6th-century BCE Babylonians believed Earth was "a disc girted by sea and mountains," and that around 1000 BCE the Aryans of India believed the world rested on the back of a turtle or elephant. According to Hannam, Aristotle was the first person to figure out that Earth was a sphere, but he was "right for the wrong reasons," believing that the planet was an accumulation of solid matter that "had fallen towards the centre of the universe." The author examines the slow spread of Aristotle's discovery, discussing how the popularity of astrology in India during the first centuries of the common era drove astronomers to study the Greek philosopher and his intellectual heirs, and how rabbi Judah ha-Nasi's favorable remarks in the Talmud about Greek cosmology paved the way for Judaism's abandonment of the Hebrew Bible's assumption of a flat Earth. The trivia captivates (the prevailing view under China's Han dynasty claimed "the sky was round and the Earth was square"), offering a globe-trotting tour of how a major scientific breakthrough made its way across the world. Readers will be enlightened.
