What people lacked in the past was the understanding of physics necessary to explain these observations, including the concept of gravity and its properties.Įven if the world were flat, gravity would still pull us towards its center. However, outside of fantasy literature, the spheroidal nature of the Earth’s surface was apparent to many in ancient times, based on astronomical and geographical phenomena, such as the way ships disappear over the horizon on their way to the open ocean, or the changing appearance of the moon. ![]() The Earth, for instance, being massive and approximately spherical, pulls every object with mass towards its center of mass, making us perceive a downward pull. Gravity is the force that pulls two bodies of mass toward each other, as demonstrated for the first time in the Cavendish experiment. In the realm of fantasy literature, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, which is borne on the backs of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a giant tortoise, is well-known and brings the flat Earth concept to life. In fact, there is still a small but active community of people who strongly argue that we live on a flat disc, establishing organizations like the Flat Earth Society, which acts to promote this idea. ![]() Nearly every child today knows for a fact that the Earth is round, but in the past the prevailing opinion was that the Earth is flat.
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