Hi everybody,
After a furtive foray for food the other day I found a copy of Stephen J. Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack ( ISBN 2-224-04472-9, Jonathan Cape 1996) going for a guinea in the charity shop for Peterboroughʼs Wood Green animal shelter.
Itʼs a collection of his essays and articles about evolutionary science and related issues in one of which, titled Late Birth of a Flat Earth, I was pleasantly suprised to find that Gould puts in a very good word for the Venerable Bede, indeed opens the article about him and his tomb in Durham Cathedral. Amongst other things, Late Birth of a Flat Earth discusses the myth that literate Europeans ever believed in a flat earth, and Gould cites the Venerable Bedeʼs scientific works as proof positive for just how contrafactual the myth is: “and Bede clearly presented his classic conception of the earth as a sphere at the hub of the cosmos – orbis in medio totius mundi positus ( an orb placed at the center of the universe). Lest anyone misconstrue his intent, Bede then explicitly stated that he meant a three-dimensional sphere, not a flat plate. Moreover, he added, our planetary sphere may be considered as perfect because even the highest mountains produce no more than an imperceptible ripple on a globe of such great diameter.”
This last sentence tickled my tendaciousness because of another myth, one that science created for itself in Early Modern times: that of the Great Southern Continent. Fill me in and correct me who may, as Iʼve found this a puzzlingly hard subject to check up about, but as I presently understand it, the story goes like this: somewhere between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, largely as a result of the first great voyages of discovery by Sir Francis Drake, Vasco da Gama, Magellan etc., the-then men of science or natural philosophers couldn’t help but wonder, since so much of the Earth’s known land mass lay in the northern hemisphere, that in order for the Earth’s rotation to remain stable there must be, surely, a Counterweight Continent of roughly equivalent area in the southern hemisphere. Indeed, some of those great voyages of discovery were launched to look for it and, if memory serves, it was one of Captain Cook’s expeditions that finally shot that fox: there is no Great Southern Continent.
As we now know, the greater land mass of the northern hemisphere is nowhere near large enough to affect the Earth’s rotation, because “even the highest mountains produce no more than an imperceptible ripple on a globe of such great diameter.”
So, none of that whole misadventure need ever have happened, if only theyʼd listened to our dear, old Venerable Bede...
* Maybe it’s an embarrasment scientists would fain forget, like the proportion of astronomers and astrophysicists who bought into the life-on-Mars belief sparked off by Percival Lowell in Victorian times, not substantially debunked until spectroscopic analyis was good enough, in Edwardian times, to demonstrate that the Martian atmosphere was too thin, too shallow and too *&%!ing cold to support anything more than lichens and mosses, if we’re lucky. Only for Edgar Rice Burroughs to re-launch the whole whoopty-do, canals and all, with those bloody awful pulp sci-fi novels of his. Lest ġesīþas mistake this for some off-topic footnote here, consult Bill Griffiths’ Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic ( ISBN 1-898281-33-5, 1996 Anglo-Saxon Books), as he consulted BL Cotton MS. Tib.A.iii, to learn that Ġif hē ġeseo tweġen mōnan þæt byþ micel ġefea. Hmm. The passage concerns divination from dreams and, speaking of a dreamer, means, “If he sees two moons, that is ( a sign of) great joy to come.”
Now disbelievers may scoff, but it’s a hard fact that there’s only one planet you can stand on, known to modern science, where you can see two moons...
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The moral right of the author to be identified from space has been asserted.
