Flat Earth
Archaic conception of Earth's shape / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat-Earth model. In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of the Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world.[1][2][3][4] By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions.
It is a historical myth that medieval Europeans generally thought the Earth was flat.[5] This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings.[6] Despite the scientific fact and obvious effects of Earth's sphericity, pseudoscientific[7] flat-Earth conspiracy theories are espoused by modern flat Earth societies and, increasingly, by unaffiliated individuals using social media.[8][9]