Also, Aristotle argued, “our observations of the stars” make it clear “not only that the earth is circular, but also that it is a circle of no great size.” He pointed out that “quite a small change of position to south or north” significantly changes “the stars which are overhead, and the stars seen are different, as one moves northward or southward.” Just as ships can be hidden from view by the curvature of the horizon, so too can the stars.

When the Moon passes through the shadow of the Earth, that shadow is always the circular shadow of a sphere. Plato’s student Aristotle offered further “evidence of the senses” to support his own conclusion that the Earth “must necessarily be spherical.” First, there was the evidence of lunar eclipses. 4 When you sail toward a ship, island, or lighthouse, their tallest points are the first thing to peek up over the curve of the horizon. Sailors would have noticed that the sails of approaching ships appeared before the hulls of the ships became visible because the surface of the sea is slightly curved, like the surface of an enormous ball. Indeed, this was one of the first cosmic facts to be worked out correctly by ancient people because evidence of a spherical Earth is visible to the naked eye.īy the time of the philosopher Socrates and his student Plato, many Greeks understood that the Earth could only be a sphere. The globe has been clearly understood for thousands of years. Portions of this article appeared previously in Daniel Loxton’s detailed history of the Flat Earth movement in Junior Skeptic #53, bound within Skeptic magazine 19.4 (2014). However, we do not need to rely on evidence from modern space agencies to confirm the roundness of the Earth for ourselves. It is unreasonable to dismiss all of the evidence from the entire history of space exploration, especially when there is zero evidence for a decades-long “globularist” conspiracy. Flat Earthers claim that all images of the globe are fraudulent inventions, and all testimony from astronauts is false. 3 Most obviously, there are many thousands of images and videos of the Earth from space, including a continually changing live stream view of the globe from the International Space Station-not to mention all the astronauts who have personally seen the Earth from orbit. The evidence for a spherical Earth is overwhelming. According to believers, government forces promote a completely fictitious model of the cosmos in order to conceal the true nature of the Earth.

Recent news stories, 1 celebrity endorsements, and Google search trends 2 have highlighted an apparently growing conspiracy theory belief that the Earth is not a globe, but instead a flat disc.

What is the flat earth theory