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by Murfreesboro » Fri Sep 23, 2011 8:51 am
Interesting thought about the various denominations of money. It's not a bad idea to keep some on hand for emergencies.
About the "flat-earthers"--I don't think very many people in antiquity actually believed the earth was flat. For many centuries, educated people believed in the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos--the earth was the center of everything, but it was round, encased in a number of spheres, where all the planets and stars were fixed and circling the earth all the time. Anyone who lived near a harbor knew that ships would appear first by their masts, or disappear last by their masts. Since people could come back to harbor after they had sailed out, most people probably "got it" that the ship was only seeming to disappear because of the curvature of the earth.
What caused the uproar back in the 16th or 17th century wasn't the idea that the earth was round, but that it was not the center of the universe. That was a tough battle.
I've studied many centuries of Western literature, so I always defend the intelligence of people who lived centuries ago. They were not very different from us, and they were plenty smart.
