The Bad Astronomer posted about this BBC article, but I just need to chime in.
According to the BBC, the idea that the Earth is flat, and not an oblate spheroid, is still alive and well amongst people who are obviously unsuitable for being around my children.
Two of the interviewees said:
Mr Davis now believes “the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite – it stretches horizontally forever”.
“And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep”, he adds.
James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website, has a slightly different take. “The Earth is, more or less, a disc,” he states. “Obviously it isn’t perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter.”
In this day and age, the fact that someone who was interviewed for a news story (that was posted on the Internet!) can believe that the Globular Earth Theory is a massive conspiracy just boggles my foot. I like to think I’m relatively tolerant about people’s beliefs and such, but if someone were to present this idea to me as fact, I’d have to either tell them they were a bonehead and leave, or if they were at my house, let them know that they were no longer welcome. Some types of anti-intellectualism should not be tolerated.
Leave a Reply