This may be a stupid question, but can anyone come up with any possible argument for why this might be false:
#40 - "(because position of North is arbitrary)"
Just curious.
#40 - "(because position of North is arbitrary)"
Just curious.
In non-scientific terms, the orientation of the map is a fairly universally accepted format from which most people work, so in that sense it is necessary that North is at the top because that's what people understand.
I'm sure someone with a little more knowledge of cartographic history/time to research will fill in some blanks here but I'm fairly certain the orientation we give to globes and maps was from European influence, consequently it makes sense for them to place themselves at the "top" half of the world rather than the "bottom".
For example the Egyptians put south "up" not because of interior decorating but because even the dumbest sailor understands water flows "down" and the nile more or less goes from S to N, so make them match, so the nile flows down on the world and on the map.
As for the compass stuff, northern hemisphere astronomers figured out the whole "north star" thing a long time before compasses, and a set of star maps for each season (or month, or whatever) more or less has the same circumpolar stars on every map (although a different orientation), so I guess to smear the ink the least you draw the circumpolar stars first, why not at the top. Or rephrased the natural way to figure out a star map is to pattern match the circumpolar stars, hold up your star map matching the circumpolar stars on the map with the world, and you "naturally" end up with the north side up, more or less, so you can read the star names with the "boring" circumpolar stars matched up and the zenith at the center of the page. Or rephrased something like the boring circumpolar stars are always "naturally" going to be one corner of the circle of your map so you'd tend to write the seasonal star names right side up across the map, sorta. Well it's hard to describe but makes sense if you physically act it out.
Rephrased, in the northern hemisphere you've always got a north star to find and face towards. Then hold up your map (star map or geographic) until N points to that star, which happens to be the way you're facing. Coincidentally that means the N always ends up at the top of the page. I suppose just to be a PITA you could find Polaris, face it, and "About Face" just to be difficult, then match up your map with "N aka toward Polaris" to the bottom, but its likely not happening.
As for which way we call 'up' - here's an excerpt from the 'North' Wikipedia article as for why 'North' is up instead of 'South':
Up is a metaphor for north. The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The historian Daniel Boorstin suggests that perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient for study if they were in the upper right-hand corner.
Edit: As user javindo points out, the excerpt is especially true for globes where studying land on the bottom of a globe is especially cumbersome. It's hardly arbitrary that ~3/4 of land is in the Northern Hemisphere.
No, north is based on Earth's rotational axis. Magnetic north is not true north, as a good topographic map will indicate.
North is a convention of rotation direction: from above the north pole, a planet appears to rotate counterclockwise.
I believe the word "arbitrary" applies because Magnetic North pulls a compass needle in a specific way, but that technically, the needle points both north and south.
It is merely due to convention that we navigate by first finding magnetic north. It would be just as easy to navigate by finding magnetic south...mathematically speaking.
If you live in the N hemisphere theres a really convenient star nearly perfectly (by olden standards) north. Polaris.
If you live in the N hemisphere you could never see a "south star" if one existed, which it doesn't (although there are some close ones).
If you live on a rotating planet, there's no such thing as a permanently "East" star or permanently "West" star.
So you inherently end up navigating off the north star. And in another post I tried to explain there's some built in human-user-interface issues that you tend to hold the map upward pointing to the one feature you're sure of, and with ancient-style celestial nav thats always going to be north because of the north star aka Polaris... so once you have literate map users, map makers are inevitably going to write place names right side up with top pointing to Polaris aka the north star aka "North"