Columbus, Earth Form and Hollywood *

Original author: Jesús Zamora Bonilla
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* Yes, with one "l"

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It is said that the biography of Christopher Columbus for the authorship of Washington Irving, published in 1828, launched the legend that allegedly it was the discoverer of America who convinced the "almost medieval" Europeans that the Earth was round. Since then, this legend has been living in the public consciousness. Nothing could be further from the truth, because in the Middle Ages any educated person knew that the Earth was round, especially after the cosmological works of Plato (Timaeus), Aristotle (De Caelo, Physics) and Ptolemy (Almagest) transferred in the XI - XII centuries. in Latin and commented scholastic philosophers. The roundness of the Earth was so trivial that Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century Summa Theologia presented it as an example of the fact of the faithful beyond all doubt. He wrote that there are too many ways to test this hypothesis — the ships approaching the coast of the mountain can be seen before the coast, the shadow of the Earth during lunar eclipses is always round, and that the earth, as the heaviest element, tends to the center of the universe, that is, it accumulates there equally all sides. The first two arguments were empirical and true both in the times of Thomas and in our time, and the third was theoretical, based on a theory from ancient Greek cosmology, in which we no longer believe - however, it is quite close to how planets round due to the force of gravity.

But if the Earth’s roundness was a well-known fact among educated Europeans during the time of Columbus, then where did all the noise come from? It is known that the discoverer greatly underestimated the size of the Earth: although most astronomers of his time converged on a figure very close to the real one, based on the measurements of Eratosthenes, made in the 3rd century BC, Columbus believed that the Earth is much smaller, and that the distance from Spain to Japan when traveling across the Atlantic should be 3,000 miles, not 12,000 miles, as a matter of fact. Of course, if there was no land between them, the journey would take too much time, and the ship would run out of provisions. Therefore, most governments of that time refused to finance such an insane and suicidal expedition. But this project, from the point of view of the Renaissance intellectuals, didn’t really conceive of a real distance from Europe to Asia across the ocean in a truly suicidal light. After all, there could be any land between continents, such as the Canary Islands or the Azores, colonized by Spain and Portugal less than a hundred years before.


The spheres of the four elements from the print publication De Sphera, Venice, 1485. Earth - zigzags, water - waves, air - clouds, flame - fire.

The fact was that scientists of that time believed in the theory that such a large land like America and even a small group of islands could not exist in the middle of that ocean, which was thought to stretch from western Europe to eastern Asia. The man responsible for this theory was perhaps of English origin, John Golivudsky (not to be confused with Hollywood), better known as John Sacrobosco, author of the most influential astronomical treatise of the late Middle Ages and beginning of the 17th century, De Sphera (written around 1230). AD), as well as one of the people who brought Arabic numerals to Europe.

And although the title of the book does not refer to the Earth, but to the sphere of the entire Universe, whose limits are limited to the sphere of fixed stars, it also clearly demonstrates the sphericity of the Earth - using the same arguments that Thomas Aquinas used, originating from the times of Aristotle in the 4th century BC .e In general, the Sacrobosco world scheme is based on the space of Aristotle with the addition of Ptolemy's planetary theory (the theory of epicycles), and De Sphera was a brief popularization of this theory, as well as the first systematic description of the work of Ptolemy Almagest in Western Europe after its translation from Arabic to Latin in Toledo made a few decades before.

Like Thomas Aquinas, Sakrobosko, also being a monk, tried to bring the well-known empirical facts (observation of the sky and the surface of the Earth) and the theoretical understanding of the world, which had the beginning of Aristotle's Physics, into the system. It is known that according to his cosmology, the Universe consists of five different “elements”: the ether from which the stellar spheres are made, and the sublunary four classical elements. The elements are sorted according to their density, and the densest are closer to the center of the cosmos, and therefore the earth is in the lowest position, then there is water, then the air above, and finally the fire rising to the moon's orbit. The ethereal world is “easier” than fire, therefore it occupies the most privileged, starry position.

Such an idea of ​​space implies (for reasons that today we would call symmetry) that there are an equal number of all elements. Therefore, the size of stellar orbits is much larger than the sublunary world (the space between the Moon and Earth): the ether is very light. Similarly, fire weighs less than air, air less than water, and therefore the moon is relatively far from the surface of the Earth (far away by human standards, but close to the size of the entire universe, or, compared to the distance to fixed stars), because in the space between the surface of the Earth and the orbit of the moon should fit a very large amount of air and fire.

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Reproduction of the scheme of spheres of earth and water from Sakrobosko in Jean Boden's Comprehensive Theater of Nature, 1596

And what happens to the remaining elements, water and earth? The same laws of symmetry reign over them, therefore, since water is less dense than earth (from 1/5 to 1/10 by weight, depending on what you choose as soil, stones, metal), water should be much more than the ground, so that the total "weight" of both elements was the same. Therefore, the complete picture of Aristotle-Hollywood space is approximately the following: a small sphere of “earth” in the center, surrounded by a sphere of water about 10 times larger in size, surrounded by a larger sphere of air, surrounded by a much larger sphere of fire, surrounded by an incredibly huge, astronomically large system of spheres consisting of ether (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, fixed stars - in order of increasing distance from the center of the world).

It is a beautiful picture, but with problems in terms of empirical adequacy: if it were true, we would have drowned under several thousand kilometers of water, which obviously did not happen. The question arises: if the earth is heavier than water, why in some places it rises above the water? Why didn't the whole earth sink?


Space layout printed edition De Sphera, Venice, 1537. On Earth, only Europe, Asia and Africa are indicated. 45 years after the discovery of America.

The monastic thinking of Sakrobosko issued a suitable answer: creating the world, God slightly displaced the earth's sphere from the center of the universe so that its small part protruded above the surface of the water sphere, large enough to fit the then known continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, t . "old light". It was easy to assume that this part of the earth has a spherical shape. The obvious consequence of such a picture of the world will be the impossibility of the existence of other masses of surface land, except for the “old world”, because if we sail to the ship, say, from Lisbon, to the west, then the surface of the earth sphere will more and more plunge into the water (water sphere), exactly to the middle of the journey, after which the distance between the surfaces of both spheres begins to shrink again.

And since this idea of ​​the cosmological distribution of the four elements was basic during the time of Columbus [end of the 15th century - approx. Transl.], It was obvious to most intellectuals that nothing like America could exist. And therefore this discovery began not only to change society from both sides of the Atlantic (especially from the west), but also to destroy faith in the correctness of the ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy about the structure of the cosmos. And by the way, it also led to the modern idea of ​​the “globe”, that is, a planet consisting of solid stone, with a small amount of water scattered over its surface, and with a thin layer of air surrounding it - and this, in turn, began the process of discrediting the theory of the "four elements".

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