B.o.B, the Georgia-based recording artist, is claiming that the Earth is flat, going against what even ancient Greeks (like Aristotle) knew.
Over the last several days, the rapper and producer tweeted several items to his 2 million or so followers:
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691411463051804676/photo/1
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691415749353558016
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691431876007821312
In all, B.o.B posted more than a dozen assertions that the Earth is flat, and he doesn’t appear to be trolling.
He got a response from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/691652747674980355
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/691647814338629632
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/691650342363209729
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/691655467978919936
Here are a few more tweets:
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691420927939117056
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691422284205178880
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691426907984760832
https://twitter.com/ZacK60_WPS/status/691614190889476096
https://twitter.com/ZacK60_WPS/status/691614190889476096
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691415260134158336
Later, B.o.B tweeted excerpts from what appears to be a book that posits the Flat Earth theory.
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691632786139136000
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691631549968748545
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691630923851436033
After he received criticism and ridicule for his ideas, he replied:
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/690712038851538944
According to Vice, there’s an entire forum dedicated to the Flat Earth theory, and they carry on theories contained in Samuel Rowbotham’s work, “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe,” published in 1881.
A Vice reporter asked: “If you look through a telescope, you will see that every planet and star in the universe is spherical. Why would the Earth be an exception?”
A person on the forum replied to the reporter: “Don’t go too far into sophism. It’s not because every planet seems spherical that the Earth is spherical as well. Our planet is very special. First, it is inhabited. The ancient Greeks used to think the Earth was round, because they believed every celestial body was a perfect sphere, including the Earth. They just strengthened their assertion with observation.”
It’s worth noting that many ancient peoples didn’t actually think the Earth was flat, but they thought it had a bowl- or dome-like shape. Some ancients also thought the Earth was round. English philosopher Bede, who lived in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., wrote the Earth “is an orb placed in the center of the universe; in its width it is like a circle, and not circular like a shield but rather like a ball, and it extends from its center with perfect roundness on all sides.”
That wasn’t put to the test until the 15th century when Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe.
The earliest globe is said to have been created by Crates of Mallus in 150 B.C.
Here’s more, according to a NASA writer:
It has actually been known that the Earth was round since the time of the ancient Greeks. I believe that it was Pythagoras who first proposed that the Earth was round sometime around 500 B.C.
As I recall, he based his idea on the fact that he showed the Moon must be round by observing the shape of the terminator (the line between the part of the Moon in light and the part of the Moon in the dark) as it moved through its orbital cycle. Pythagoras reasoned that if the Moon was round, then the Earth must be round as well.
After that, sometime between 500 B.C. and 430 B.C., a fellow called Anaxagoras determined the true cause of solar and lunar eclipses - and then the shape of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse was also used as evidence that the Earth was round. Around 350 B.C., the great Aristotle declared that the Earth was a sphere (based on observations he made about which constellations you could see in the sky as you travelled further and further away from the equator) and during the next hundred years or so, Aristarchus and Eratosthenes actually measured the size of the Earth!
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