Did Columbus and the Wright Brothers believe in historic misconceptions?

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In summary, the conversation discusses various historical examples of theories or beliefs that were initially met with skepticism or disbelief before eventually being accepted as truth. These examples include the belief in a round Earth, the possibility of flight, and the cause of the Great Fire of Rome. The conversation also touches on the idea that it takes time for truth to be accepted and that there will always be skeptics and those who oppose new ideas.
  • #1
SGT
This should be an answer to the thread proposed by champ2823 entitles Closed thread, but since it has been closed by the moderator I am starting a new one.
I will not discuss the 9/11 conspiracy. I think Ivan did well in closing it. I will address some historic misconceptions of the author:
Was Columbus not a conspiracy theorist cause he believed the world was round and not flat?
Every educated person in the 15the century knew the Earth was round and they accepted the measurement made by Eratostenes in the 3rd century BICE, that is very close to the 40000km now accepted. Because of that nobody believed that Asia could be reached by navigating to west.
Columbus used another estimation that gave 25000km to Earth's equatorial circumference. With this estimation Asia would be very close to Europe.
Fortunately for Columbus, there was the american continent in the way, or else he and his crew would perish from lack of food and water.
What about the Wright Brothers, they thought we could fly.
In the same way, people knew that the heavier than air was possible. Birds fly! The problem was of technology, not of science. And the Wright brothers were not alone in their work. Several other inventors were doing the same, including the Brazilian Santos Dement, that flew in Paris after the Wright brother's flight, but without recourse to a catapult for take off.
What about those Roman conspiracy theorists that believed Nero burnt Rome
Modern historians don't believe Nero burnt Rome. What was burnt were poor quarters of Rome and it was probably an accident favored by the fact that the quarters were composed mainly of wooden shacks. Nero has taken the opportunity to blame the annoying christians and later rebuild the quarters with mansions in marble.
 
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  • #2
Excellent summary SGT. What you said about educated people knowing the world was round in the 15th century held in the 14th century too. About 1360 Oresme and Buridan wrote duelling treatises on the physics on the surface of a rotating globe, given a conserved motion. Of course because of the Church they couldn't admit the globe they were talking about was the Earth. Spherical was OK, rotating was not, because the psalms plainly said that the Sun moves across the sky.

Before any further outcome, one way or the other, Oresme was given a Bishopric in far away Normandy (I have always speculated it was a sop to shut him up), and Buridan disappeared, perhaps dying in the plague which struck in 1363, I think. So we had to wait another 250 years for Galileo, and 500 for Coriolis.
 
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  • #3
Gee, thanks, does that somehow disprove the point he was trying to make, that it takes time for truth to be accepted?
 
  • #4
Esperanto said:
Gee, thanks, does that somehow disprove the point he was trying to make, that it takes time for truth to be accepted?
If all the examples are wrong, then there is a good bet there is something wrong with the point.

I have another example: The Sound Barrier. The fact of the matter is that physicists knew that there was no hard and fast barrier (after all, bullets had been traveling faster than that for some time) - again, the problem was an engineering problem.
 
  • #5
Woah...I don't remember saying that Columbus was the ONLY person to say that the world was round or that any of the examples were only theorized by a single person. Before Columbus' voyage, was the mass appeal...i.e majority, stating that the world was round? No. That's the point. No ideas original and there's nothing new under the sun so of course there were others and people before with the same theories. The point is that the majority didn't believe these examples until it was proven to be true and then it became standard truth. As with anything, a few scholars compound information to form something relevant as in an invention, scientific theorems, etc... and once this is proven, the mass of skeptics become silent. But while these scholars are doing there thing, the overwhelming majority scrutinizes every part of it. Just because you can name some other people that had the same viewpoint years before is completely irrelevant. For every person striking at the root of a problem, there are 1,000 people cutting at its branches.
 
  • #6
The difference champ, is that the people that were right had scientific evidence to back them up, the "conspiracy theorists" don't, as a matter of fact, they argue against scientific evidence. Posting paranoid suppositions despite logic and fact just isn't going to fly.
 
  • #7
champ2823 said:
Woah...I don't remember saying that Columbus was the ONLY person to say that the world was round or that any of the examples were only theorized by a single person. Before Columbus' voyage, was the mass appeal...i.e majority, stating that the world was round? No. That's the point. No ideas original and there's nothing new under the sun so of course there were others and people before with the same theories. The point is that the majority didn't believe these examples until it was proven to be true and then it became standard truth.
Did you not just disprove your own thesis? The fact that uneducated peasants in 1490 didn't know the Earth was round says nothing at all about the status of the science of the time. And the fact that people who are ignorant are ignorant is exactly the problem with things like the 9/11 conspiracy theories! Columbus wasn't a conspiracy theorist precisely because he was not ignorant! Your argument boils down to 'I don't know what I'm talking about, but since there are others who also don't know what they are talking about, I must be right, and people who do know what they are talking about are wrong!' Uh huh... :uhh:
 
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  • #8
I just deleted two posts. This discussion will not be about 911 conspiracy theories or the thread will be closed.
 
  • #9
selfAdjoint said:
Excellent summary SGT. What you said about educated people knowing the world was round in the 15th century held in the 14th century too. About 1360 Oresme and Buridan wrote duelling treatises on the physics on the surface of a rotating globe, given a conserved motion. Of course because of the Church they couldn't admit the globe they were talking about was the Earth. Spherical was OK, rotating was not, because the psalms plainly said that the Sun moves across the sky.

Before any further outcome, one way or the other, Oresme was given a Bishopric in far away Normandy (I have always speculated it was a sop to shut him up), and Buridan disappeared, perhaps dying in the plague which struck in 1363, I think. So we had to wait another 250 years for Galileo, and 500 for Coriolis.
The concept of a round Earth was familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans. The idea goes back to Pythagoras (569-500), but in Eratostenes time the average person new it.
The fact that a ship moving towards the horizon with the progressing disappearance of the hull, the masts and the sails was well known and attributed to the roundness of the planet. Eratostenes evaluated the Earth's circumference, but nobody at his time would think in challenge the sphericity of the Earth.
 
  • #10
Ok, I would like to know Ivan why you deleted my last post. I'm not positive but I do not recall much chatter about 9-11. What I do recall was pointing out Northwoods, PNAC, and the Downing Street Memos. Since all three of these are official public documents with the Downing Street Memos officially authorized by the British govt., PNAC's document still on their organizations website, and Northwoods being declassified, I hardly see how they could be some sort of conspiracy theory...unless you just want to call them that so you don't have to think about what they mean. Quoting people like Hitler, Goehring, Caesar, and Madison doesn't seam like a conspiracy either.
SGT-Thanks for the reference to the Greeks and Romans. Obviously others like those you pointed out had understood that concept, my main point was that it was not popular belief.
 
  • #11
champ2823 said:
SGT-Thanks for the reference to the Greeks and Romans. Obviously others like those you pointed out had understood that concept, my main point was that it was not popular belief.
It was popular belief in the antiquity. In Columbus time every sailor knew about the progressive disappearance of distant ships and that it was due to Earth's sphericity.
If you define popular belief as the beliefs of ignorant people, then any educated person is entitled as opposing to those beliefs.
 
  • #12
You are nitpicking the examples he uses to prove a point to change the meaning of what he is trying to say.
 
  • #13
SGT said:
It was popular belief in the antiquity. In Columbus time every sailor knew about the progressive disappearance of distant ships and that it was due to Earth's sphericity.
If you define popular belief as the beliefs of ignorant people, then any educated person is entitled as opposing to those beliefs.

Who's to define what person or people are ignorant or not. I mean today we know its round but back then it wasn't proven fact. Today we know that those that said it was flat were wrong but back in that time period they didn't have concrete evidence. Maybe 100 years from now its proven that some popular belief of today is completely wrong...does that mean that everyone who believed that belief today is ignorant? And throughout history for every civilization and every person as is today, there is some belief that one has on some aspect that is completely wrong. Does that mean that every person throughout history is ignorant? We can look back on those people today and say that they were completely wrong and others were completely right, but that's hindsight. And as Shopenhauer (sp) says...All truth passes through 3 stages...First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is known as self-evident.

Esperanto...you are exactly correct. My examples are examples of popular belief for the time periods. Just because a handful or group of people had the same theories years before is irrelevant. It also takes time for the truth to be known and the history books are constantly being rewritten. Take the JFK incident. It was overwhelming consensus that Oswald was the lone assassin. Now, the Zapruder film shows contradictory evidence that there was more than one shooter and James Files has admitted many times that he was one. It may take the fall of the U.S. for all documents to be released and investigated by historians to find out with concise certainty everything that happened on that day and that could be years and years away. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is the same way. It was the reason the Vietnam War started and now historians are finding no evidence that it ever happened and veterans are coming forward saying that they were there but that it never occurred and history books are being rewritten. All this stuff just takes time and I wouldn't call anyone ignorant regardless of what their belief on each situation is. They are controversial matters and stemmed in high emotional thought. Hey, wouldn't it be crazy and exciting to read a history book hundreds of years from now about today's day and age. And conversely, things that happen like the unibomber are set in stone as there isn't any credible evidence showing anything contradicting that story.
 
  • #14
champ2823 said:
Who's to define what person or people are ignorant or not. I mean today we know its round but back then it wasn't proven fact.
The definition of "ignorant" is to not know something. If the Earth is round and someone doesn't know it, they are ignorant.

What is right and what is wrong is not based on popular perception, no matter how widely accepted it is.
 
  • #15
SGT said:
The concept of a round Earth was familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans. The idea goes back to Pythagoras (569-500), but in Eratostenes time the average person new it.
The fact that a ship moving towards the horizon with the progressing disappearance of the hull, the masts and the sails was well known and attributed to the roundness of the planet. Eratostenes evaluated the Earth's circumference, but nobody at his time would think in challenge the sphericity of the Earth.
I am not at all certain of this.
The typical inhabitant of Greece at this time was a peasant who lived out his life in his "polis", more often than not just a glorified hamlet.
Only a minority of the Greek population was wide-travelling merchants; galleys were rown by slaves, and thus, even if the nautically knowledgeable subsegment was aware of the horizon argument, I'm not at all convinced if that knowledge disseminated any further than to the (even smaller) engineering&scientist segment of the Greek population.

Remember that in classical Athens, you had a specialized court to judge inanimate objects if the population thought the object had perpetrated a crime (like a hammer falling down from a shelf and hitting a man in his head so that he died).

While the seeds of rationalist Western thinking may be thought of being first sown in Greece, what the Greeks themselves reaped as a cultural harvest was for the most part irrational superstitions.
 
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  • #16
Esperanto said:
You are nitpicking the examples he uses to prove a point to change the meaning of what he is trying to say.
I only showed that his examples were false. The people he mentioned as revolutionary were not. I am not minimizing Columbus and the Wright brothers prowesses. I am only saying they were the first to achieve things that would anyway be achieved by someone else in their generation.
Even the greatest scientist of all times, sir Isaac Newton made so much important discoveries because others before him had discovered the fundaments for them. Newton himself said that he got so high because he stepped on the shoulders of giants.
But the truth is: the fact that long held popular beliefs have been shown false does not mean that all such beliefs are necessarily false. For instance, people have always believed that if they jumped from a cliff they would hurt themselves or even die. This belief is true and Newton attributed it to gravity.
 
  • #17
SGT said:
But the truth is: the fact that long held popular beliefs have been shown false does not mean that all such beliefs are necessarily false. For instance, people have always believed that if they jumped from a cliff they would hurt themselves or even die. This belief is true and Newton attributed it to gravity.
This isn't belief they held; it was knowledge they had.
 
  • #18
arildno said:
I am not at all certain of this.
The typical inhabitant of Greece at this time was a peasant who lived out his life in his "polis", more often than not just a glorified hamlet.
Only a minority of the Greek population was wide-travelling merchants; galleys were rown by slaves, and thus, even if the nautically knowledgeable subsegment was aware of the horizon argument, I'm not at all convinced if that knowledge disseminated any further than to the (even smaller) engineering&scientist segment of the Greek population.

Remember that in classical Athens, you had a specialized court to judge inanimate objects if the population thought the object had perpetrated a crime (like a hammer falling down from a shelf and hitting a man in his head so that he died).

While the seeds of rationalist Western thinking may be thought of being first sown in Greece, what the Greeks themselves reaped as a cultural harvest was for the most part irrational superstitions.

I agree with you that it would not be a universal knowledge. Even in the 21st century there are still people that believe the Earth is flat.
But http://celator.com/cws/marotta.html says that coins containing the picture of terrestrial globes circulated in ancient Greece and Rome.
 
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  • #19
arildno said:
This isn't belief they held; it was knowledge they had.
How do you distinguish between belief and knowledge? Do you think knowledge is true and belief is false? Or that knowledge is evident and belief is not? As you mentioned in your other post, for a peasant living far from the sea it is evident that the Earth is flat. For everybody it is evident that the Sun, the Moon and the stars circle the Earth in one day.
 
  • #20
SGT said:
I agree with you that it would not be a universal knowledge. Even in the 21st century there are still people that believe the Earth is flat.
But http://celator.com/cws/marotta.html says that coins containing the picture of terrestrial globes circulated in ancient Greece and Rome.
Monetary economy was only in a very minor way present in the ancient world (particularly ancient Greece).
For most regions, barter economy was the rule, along with even more ancient clan types of redistribution economy, where the clan members produce goods, the clan chief redistributes it internal to the clan, while retaining goods to trade with outsiders
(the last economy is known to have been practiced at Mycenean times; there is no particular reason why not vestiges of this remained into the Classical age, especially since the pater familias&familia structure in Rome at a later stage seems to have worked along roughly similar principles)

Thus, the money argument can at the very best be said to be of relevance with respect to extremely urbanized communities in Greece, say Athens.
Athens, however, was an anomaly in many ways when compared to other "city-states".
 
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  • #21
SGT said:
How do you distinguish between belief and knowledge? Do you think knowledge is true and belief is false?
Your brother or neighbour stepped over a cliff and fell down and died?
Accidents did happen in earlier days as well.
In addition, persons thatching the roofs on their farms would quite often fall down and break a leg; inferring that essentially the same thing would happen if they fell down that cliff should be regarded as a reasonable deduction, rather than a belief.
The ancients had vast amounts of supporting evidence that falling down a cliff would be injurious.
It is whether you've got evidence (and the quality of it) to support your idea that determines whether your idea is merely a belief, or a piece of knowledge.
 
  • #22
If you believe the official 9/11 story you will believe anything.
 
  • #23
arildno said:
Your brother or neighbour stepped over a cliff and fell down and died?
Accidents did happen in earlier days as well.
In addition, persons thatching the roofs on their farms would quite often fall down and break a leg; inferring that essentially the same thing would happen if they fell down that cliff should be regarded as a reasonable deduction, rather than a belief.
The ancients had vast amounts of supporting evidence that falling down a cliff would be injurious.
It is whether you've got evidence (and the quality of it) to support your idea that determines whether your idea is merely a belief, or a piece of knowledge.
Yes, but to primitive people there was evidence that the Earth was flat and immobile. Only the evolution of the observations could present evidences to the contrary. Even now, what we take as fact is the product of present day evidence. In my belief, most of it will be confirmed by further observations, but some facts that we take as knowledge may be contradicted in the future. Will this knowledge be considered belief if this happens?
 
  • #24
Esperanto said:
If you believe the official 9/11 story you will believe anything.
Discussion about 9/11 is closed.
 
  • #25
We might use belief as the general term, rather than 2ideas;
in that case, knowledge is (ideally) true beliefs with supporting evidence, whereas mistaken beliefs that yet had supporting evidence should be called interpretative failures, or something like that.
In addition, you'll have unfounded beliefs, where supporting evidence were lacking at the outset.
 
  • #26
gee, you think arildno?
 
  • #27
arildno said:
We might use belief as the general term, rather than 2ideas;
in that case, knowledge is (ideally) true beliefs with supporting evidence, whereas mistaken beliefs that yet had supporting evidence should be called interpretative failures, or something like that.
In addition, you'll have unfounded beliefs, where supporting evidence were lacking at the outset.
What are true beliefs? Only mathematics and logic have the concepts of true and false, and this according to a given set of axioms and rules of derivation.
Experimental sciences have no truth. All we have is evidence. Evidence is highly dependent of methods and devices of observation. For an ancient, evidence about flatness and immobility of Earth was as established as the fall of bodies.
 
  • #28
An ancient can see there are horizons, too. I wouldn't have to believe the Earth was flat and immobile and I'm sure there were some who saw everything else moved so didn't have to hold strongly to the belief of Earth's immobility.
 
  • #29
Although there may have been people in Columbus' day who thought the Earth was flat, he didn't have to deal with them. His opponents differed with him ONLY on the radius of the earth. The story about how he had to convince 'flat-earthers' IS the conspiracy. Not knowing so IS ignorance.

As heavier than air flight was never a question (birds do it), the issue of getting to the east by traveling west was never an issue either. His opponents knew it could be done theoretically, they just didn't think he could carry enough provisions in his ships to make it across. As with flight, it was simply a matter of technology, not an alternate view of reality.

To cite Columbus as someone who proved doubters wrong is also nonsense. He was wrong about the radius of the earth, his opponents were right.

In my opinion Esperanto, it takes more knowledge and insight to judge these matters than you currently have. Stick to what you do well.
 
  • #30
He actually took the time to sail to America. Does it make you feel better repeating someone else near verbatim?

"In the same way, people knew that the heavier than air was possible. Birds fly! The problem was of technology, not of science."

Said by the guy who STARTED this topic.

By the way, what matters don't I know enough about are you referring to?
 
  • #31
Actually, there is very little in my post that is original. You seem to indicate that you couldn't figure out what my post referred to. It's about Columbus.
 
  • #32
Are you trying to belittle Columbus for what he did? He was the first one to attempt to sail across the world and ended up finding America. Just because others say that their belief that the world is round doesn't really mean much with this guy since he took action upon it. He and his crew had no idea what they would run into or what was going to happen but Columbus believed the world was round and that he could find a back passage into India and use this as a way to get to Jerusalem. He just happened across a whole new world. I'm sure if Columbus hadn't done it, as with what Magellan did, in due time someone else would have, but he did it first and until he did do it, there was no concrete evidence that the world was found...just intelligent assumptions based on rational thought.
Esperanto- I love that 9-11 comment. It just so happens that we can't talk about it anymore since those defending the govt's claim are having difficulty producing any evidence so it just goes into a "I'm right, you're wrong" discussion instead of an educational debate. Hell if anyone actually wants to do a real investigation, I'll pick one point, write up an essay disproving the official storyline and let you guys have at it trying to disprove what I say and what the govt's story is as true. The mod would have to give me the ok if you want and that's doubtful since people can't control themselves and just start flaming each other as if the person with the most or best insults somehow wins the discussion, but it is an issue at the crux of everything going on in the world today.
 
  • #33
All of my posts here that did talk about Columbus said that Columbus was used as an example that it takes time for something to become universally accepted. The only possibly factual thing I said was that ancients can see horizons too. I don't give jack if you are going to nitpick my nonexistent factual comments on Columbus.
 
  • #34
Esperanto said:
All of my posts here that did talk about Columbus said that Columbus was used as an example that it takes time for something to become universally accepted.
All I am saying is that Columbus is a poor example because he never said anything that ever became universally accepted.
 
  • #35
champ2823 said:
Are you trying to belittle Columbus for what he did? He was the first one to attempt to sail across the world and ended up finding America.
Ever hear about Leif Ericsson?

Esperanto- I love that 9-11 comment. It just so happens that we can't talk about it anymore since those defending the govt's claim
There you go with your conspiracy again, you are wrong, people here are referring to the engineering aspects of the collapse.

are having difficulty producing any evidence so it just goes into a "I'm right, you're wrong" discussion instead of an educational debate.
All the evidence needed has already been posted. If you can't understand it, or refuse to understand it, perhaps you would be happier at a site like www.abovetopsecret.com I think you'd be very happy there.

This is your final warning that for now any more discussion on a 9-11 conspiracy theory is suspended.

The next report is due in October. We'll see what comes out then.
 

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