Report on Long-Term Observational Data Compiled by Conservative Science
By Sally Morem
Humans relied on ancestral myth and legend for answers to the mystery. Mythology consists of stories we tell ourselves when we can’t experience the thing at first hand. Creative guesses about the shape of our planet abounded in many cultures. A table? A turtle? An island? Each one was an attempt to explain Earth’s apparent sturdy solidity and the existence of some sort of strange consistency in the directions “up” and “down.”
Then, in the 5th Century B.C.E., the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians came along and gave us an unexpected answer, one that seemed to belie common sense: That the motion of the heavens was merely a reflection of the spinning sphere on which we ride.
Science is the means by which we reach past our deeply ingrained misrepresentations and see the world as it truly is. There are many ways in which to experience the workings of the scientific method. If you wish, you may participate in some of these in this essay.
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Be a Greek mathematician. Begin in Alexandria, Egypt. Carefully measure and cut a yard-long stick, place it in open ground at high noon during the summer solstice, then measure and record the length of the shadow. Head 50 miles south next year. Use the same stick to measure the shadow at noon on summer solstice. Record your measurements. Keep doing this year after year until you end up on the Tropic of Cancer. Here you will see an astonishing sight. When you plant your stick at noon on the summer solstice, you will see no shadow.
From the changing length of the shadows and further measurements to the east and west, you will deduce the curved nature of Earth and you may conclude that its curvature wraps around and meets “on the other side” as a sphere. With ever more exacting measurements and calculations, you may determine its circumference to within a few miles of 25,000 miles.
You have just done what no man of learning—no priest, no mathematician, no astronomer, no philosopher—had ever been able to do before; you have discovered the shape and size of the world through careful observation and reasoning. You did not have to make up legends. You drew your conclusions from facts.
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Anyone even slightly familiar with the work of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot will recognize what Rob Wipond is up to in his essay (The Humanist March/April, 1998). It’s all a question of scale. Size really does matter. Your perception of Earth depends on your size and the size of your instruments in comparison with that of the planet. The shape and texture of the world will differ greatly to that of an ant as compared to that of a mountain.
In the 1960s, Mandelbrot explored the mathematical concept of coastlines and was stunned when he realized that no mapmaker really knew how long any coastline was. For example, each atlas gives a different length for the coast of Norway.
After thinking the problem through, he was even more amazed when he realized that it is mathematically impossible to determine an absolutely objective and true measurement for a coastline. Consider this. If you place your surveying instruments every mile along the fjords of Norway, you will get one distance. If you place them every half-mile, you’ll get another, much longer distance. And if you place them at smaller and smaller distances—yards, feet, inches—you’ll get progressively larger and larger numbers as you dutifully record the length of smaller and smaller bays and peninsulas.