The Earth's shape and a divorce from belief

(January, 2006)

I had this novel I wanted to write sometime in the late 1990s where the protagonist discovers that the Great Conspiracy’s deep dark secret is that the world is really flat. A secret society (I think I was going to call them the Brotherhood of Eratosthenes or something lame like that) has been keeping people deceived for centuries. Columbus? In on it. Magellan was killed when he discovered the truth on his own voyage. Lindbergh? In on it — and his child kidnapped and murdered when he threatened to spill the beans. Amelia Earheart? Another casualty of the code of silence. The moon landing? Faked. The real map of the Earth is the one used in the symbol of the UN with “Antarctica” actually the icy border of the flat Earth (presumably to prevent the oceans from running off.)

I never wrote it, and probably never will — mostly because I couldn’t think of a good Why — why lie about the shape of the Earth? Cui bono? But that being said, I like to use the flat earth as a good example of the way we let beliefs dominate our way of looking at the world. For all I know, the world really is flat… if they lied to me about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy I can’t rule out the possibility that they are lying to me about other things as well. I’ve never traveled around the world, I’ve never personally seen the world from space, and what other empirical evidence do I have for believing the world is round?

But before anyone jumps down my throat because I said the world is flat, understand that I don’t believe that. I accept as the most likely hypothesis the round world rather like although I have never fooled around in a particle physics lab I accept the existence of subatomic particles. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe anything about the shape of the Earth at all — based on my own information I cannot form an opinion, I can only accept the consensus reality. I think that most likely the world is round and will continue to hold that as my model of the world until I am proven otherwise — but if they flew me out to the edge of the Earth and I peered over it, I would switch my model with relative ease. After Santa Claus I am never making that mistake again.

The truth is, we know next to nothing about reality as it IS (and, if you accept quantum mechanics it appears that at the base level reality IS nothing that correlates with our own experiences) but are constantly guessing, theorizing, making it up as we go along. Thousands of years ago the best guess we had was a flat earth at the center of the universe with the sun and stars and planets fixed above us in some sort of inverted dome. But, confusing the map with the territory, we are very reluctant to let go of our pet theories and world models — consider what happened to Galileo when he found better evidence for the heliocentric model of the cosmso. Remember that they burned Bruno for suggesting that other planets might have life on them. This was in the era when religious thinking, inflexible and trapped in dogma, dominated the world — but even in scientific thinking paradigm shifts do not occur until most of the old guard dies off. We are stubborn and do not want to change the way we think. In a world that is in constant change this inflexibility is our chief downfall.