What shape was the Earth in the representation of the people of the Middle Ages? Detailed answer

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What shape was the Earth in the representation of the people of the Middle Ages? Detailed answer

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What shape was the Earth in the representation of the people of the Middle Ages?

Not the way you think.

Around the XNUMXth century BC. e. Almost no one thought the Earth was flat anymore. Although if you really needed to show the Earth as a flat disk, you would end up with something similar to the current UN flag.

Generally speaking, the myth of the flat earth originated in the 1828th century. The reason for this is the semi-fiction novel by Washington Irving "The Life and Travels of Christopher Columbus" (XNUMX), where the author erroneously wrote that Columbus went on his famous journey to prove that the Earth was round and not flat, as supposedly believed at that time.

The idea of a flat earth was first taken seriously in 1838 by an eccentric English eccentric named Samuel Burley Rowbotham, who published a 16-page work entitled "Cethetic Astronomy: A Description of Some Experiments Proving that the Sea Surface Is a Perfect Plane and the Earth is Not a Globe." . (The word "cetetic" comes from the Greek zetein, "to seek, find out".)

A little more than a century later, Samuel Shenton, member of the Royal Astronomical Society and devout Christian, transformed the World Cethetic Society into the International Flat Earth Society.

In theory, this question should have been buried once and for all by the NASA space program of the 1960s, which culminated in the landing on the moon. However, Shenton was not at all embarrassed. Looking at pictures of the globe taken from space, Shenton commented: "These astronauts are big cunning. For some reason, they needed people to believe that the Earth is round. That's why they falsify photographs so godlessly." And the Apollo lunar landing, in his opinion, was nothing more than a thorough Hollywood hoax, directed by Arthur C. Clarke. The membership of the Society skyrocketed.

Shenton died in 1971, having, however, managed to appoint a successor to the presidency of the Society. Shenton handed over the reins to the eccentric but terribly charismatic Charles K. Johnson, who set himself the goal of gathering under the banner of the Society all who are ready to join the heroic movement "Against Big Science". By the end of the 1990s, the number of members of the Society reached 3500.

Johnson, who lived and worked in the Mojave Desert, was convinced that the world we live in is a flat disk with the North Pole in the center, surrounded by a solid 45-meter wall of ice. The sun and moon are 52 km in diameter, and the stars are "as far from Earth as from San Francisco to Boston."

In 1995, Johnson's desert retreat burned to the ground, and with it all the archives and membership lists. Charles K. Johnson died in 2001 with only a few hundred members left in the Society. Today, the Society exists as a web forum, www.theflatearthsociety.org, with about 800 registered members.

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

How do we hear different sounds?

All sounds are produced by vibrating objects, that is, objects that make rapid forward motions. This vibration causes the molecules in the air to move, which causes the molecules in their vicinity to move, and soon the molecules in the air begin to move forward, producing what we call sound waves.

But the vibrations are different, and they produce different sounds. Sounds differ from each other in three main characteristics: loudness, pitch and tonality. The loudness of the sound depends on the distance between the vibrating object and the human ear, as well as on the amplitude of the vibrations of the vibrating object. The greater the scope of this movement, the louder the sound will be. The pitch of the sound depends on the speed of vibration (frequency) of the sounding object.

Tonality depends on the number and strength of the overtones present in the sound. This happens when high and low sounds are mixed. We won't hear anything until the sound wave passes through the ear opening and reaches the eardrum. The tympanic membrane acts like the surface of the drum and causes the three small bones in the middle ear to move in time with the sound. As a result, fluid begins to move in the inner ear.

The sound waves move the liquid, and the small hair cells in the liquid also begin to move. These hair cells convert movement into nerve impulses that travel to the brain, and the brain recognizes them as sound. But different sounds also produce different movements in our ear, which lead to different nerve impulses entering the brain, which leads to the fact that we hear different sounds!

Test your knowledge! Did you know...

▪ Who are the cavemen?

▪ Why do we need eyebrows?

▪ What impact did the economic crisis of 1974-1975 have on the development of Western civilization?

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Nano guitar string plays by itself 22.10.2019

Scientists from Lancaster University and Oxford University (UK) have created a "nano-string" that vibrates without any external influence. A tiny wire, resembling a guitar string, can be driven directly by an electric current.

To create the device, the researchers took a carbon nanotube, which is a wire about three nanometers in diameter, about 100 times thinner than a guitar string. They attached the "string" to metal supports at each end and then cooled it down to 000 degrees above absolute zero, which is -0,02°C. The central part of the wire was free to vibrate, which the researchers could detect by running a current through the wire and measuring the change in electrical resistance.

Just as a guitar string vibrates when it is plucked, a wire vibrates when electrical voltage is applied to it. Surprisingly, when they repeated the experiment without external forces, the wire also began to move. The "nano-guitar" string played by itself.

So what note does the nano guitar play? A nanotube is much thinner than a guitar string, so it vibrates at a much higher frequency - within the ultrasonic range. So no one can hear it. But you can still assign a "note" to this sound. Its frequency is 231 million hertz, which means it is an A (A) string 21 octaves above standard tuning.

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