Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story
mappingignorance.org
mappingignorance.org
It's about why the elites of Europe thought that a landmass like the Americas was impossible. Which was new to me and quite interesting.
Standard underestimation to get a government contract, after which it's too expensive to switch contractors after the underestimation is discovered.
The underlying idea of the theory is that fishermen discovered the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland and incidentally discovered Newfoundland itself. When the Grand Banks was discovered is unclear--it was definitely known in the early 1500s, but that postdates John Cabot's discovery of Newfoundland in 1497. The usual claims of preemption seem to describe the date as "1400s".
The biggest hole in the theory as described is that the nonpublication of the discovery is attributed to "fishermen keeping their new grounds secret," so why would they confide their secrets in a (rival) navigator? It also makes somewhat less sense that his voyages would have traveled in a southwesterly direction rather than a northwesterly direction if he knew that the land were to be found more to the north.
There is no real evidence to substantiate that fishermen found the Grand Banks in the 1400s. The earliest claims seem to date to at best the 1580s or so and have a vein of "we totally knew about that place but somehow lost track of it until John Cabot found it again!" Given that the modern claims seem vague as to whose fisherman it was that actually found them (Bristol, Basque, and Portuguese have all been named), it seems more like an attempt to retroactively claim primacy. There's been no archaeological evidence on Newfoundland dating to the 15th century of any presence of cod fishermen--and given the knowledge that by the end of the 16th century the industry did produce a massive infrastructure on the coast, it seems unlikely that the lack of evidence is because we haven't looked hard enough.
Colombus never really intended to go to India. He suspected all along that there were other continents to the West, but that he was unable to "pitch" the case for that to his investors (the Spanish monarchs). In order to fund his expedition he had to convince his investors that they would get good return on their investment, and the easiest way to do that was to sell it as a trade route expedition to India, which was already well known to be lucrative with desirable import goods like tea, pepper, and silk.
Colombus knew he wasn't going on a suicide mission. He would have never agreed to that, being a (mostly) rational man motivated by fame and fortune as much as anything else. He was just very savvy at _navigating_ the political and economic climate of his era. You wanna get that seed round funding? You gotta tell the investors what they want to hear.
It is fascinating to read how amazing conclusions people inferred by following perfectly sensible reasoning from basic assumptions they believed. It makes you think about the perfectly sensible reasoning we are using today and what our current ideas will seem completely silly in a few hundreds years!
So with western science tradition, and through the scientific method, we are supposed to go through the same thing. Scienctific hypotheses and results are only validated through absolute doubt, and we only accept theories if they, despite exhaustive efforts, can not be disproved.
Hopefully, through this method, there are things from today that seem completely silly, because that means some serious science kept happening!
No, not in a way it was in the old times, at least not for the natural sciences, and the book you mention very specifically argues why: the "completely wrong" beliefs were possible before the "real" science, the later always just limited by our measurements. Therefore, Newton formulas aren't "completely wrong" even after Einstein, only not precise enough for the measurements that were achieved shortly before Einstein.
The book in fact spends more chapters explaining exactly the difference between the really modern science and the status before.
* the idea that everything is made of (one of, or all) 4 elements
* humorist theory of disease
* belief in perpetual motion machines
* spontaneous generation
AFAICT all of these can be construed to be considered "good enough theories" but they generally fail to make accurate predictions, which "good science" doesn't.
They made good prediction for where the planets are going to be. They covered all the known planets. They produced accurate results for all the observations of their time. It took the lifetime work of Brahe and his development of his own observatories to even collect enough data for Kepler to be able to recognize differences between the approximate circle paths of the planets.
In short, just like Newton's, Ptolemy's formulas are a "good enough" approximation when knowing their limits.
I've even read one scientist, and I tend to believe him, claiming that Ptolemy himself, during the development of his formulas, must have used the Sun-centric model, and then he produced the "projected" result which was more acceptable for everybody who just wanted to calculate where the planets are on the sky, as seen from the Earth.
It's just that before the scientific method become common place a lot of theories weren't.
Follow up article : "Why Christopher Columbus was the Perfect Icon for a New Nation looking for a Hero" http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-christopher-columb...
Shipwrecks are only considered discovered if nobody knows exactly where they were. That's why the "discovery" of the HMS Terror was controversial: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/terror-discovery-frankli... Indigenous people had carried, through oral tradition, stories of a ship stuck in ice in precisely that place but were dismissed out of hand by investigators. It turns out they were right. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wre...
The place where they found that was, in the local tongue, a place called "Big Ship Here".
Columbus was more radical in the sense that we was willing to risk dying to find out.
But you can't discover something without recognizing that it is new (someone else can discover it from your descriptions, however) and Columbus went to his grave insisting that he had reached the East Indies.
Even by the standard by which one might "discover" a populated land, Columbus didn't, he merely encountered it. Other people recognized the value and significance and the opportunities itmade available given the technology of the day, which is why his voyages (unlike prior ones) led to prolonged contact between Europe and the New World.
And his failure to recognize the novelty of what he had encountered is why Europeans ended up naming the continents of the New World after a map maker, and not Columbus.
Fire? Writing? Textiles?
There's a case to be made its the most important discovery of his era, but then, we do tend to be Eurocentric here and the Chinese were at the climax of a centuries long golden age when Colombus was doing his thing in America.
Fire, writing and textiles are prehistoric discoveries/inventions.
Maybe, but I've yet to see even a remotely plausible argument for that position. I mean anything can be argued, but that doesn't mean there is a good argument for it, and in the case of Columbus "discovery", I don't see any reasonable standard on which it reaches anywhere near the importance of, say, agriculture. Or zero. Or lots of others.