For a long time, so we were taught, people thought the Earth was flat - a quaint, almost pitiful example of oft-cited ancient idiocy. But lurking in the literary undergrowth is strong evidence to suggest no such thing, that the Flat Earth belief system is itself a myth, and in truth (at least in civilised terms) nobody ever really doubted that the Earth is round. Except for the Flat Earth Society, of course.
Cosmologists all over the world pontificate devoutly that the Universe is flat, a fact brought home to me at the Paris Cosmology Colloquium in 2009.
At first I thought the presenters were joking, but of course they weren't.
My incredulity at the echo of ancient naivete cost me a lot of points among the eminent scientists there, who all assured me that I didn't understand the topography. Today it seems a few forward thinkers are leaning to the strong possibility that the Universe isn't flat after all, so five years on I'm relieved to be counting some friends on Twitter who share a similar sense of humour at what is hopefully a passing phase. This time, however, it was no myth, and history will have it for the record that a Flat Universe was a genuine, bona-fide belief shared by an awful lot of highly respected people of the Earth.
This is what NASA has to say: "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error."
Cosmologists all over the world pontificate devoutly that the Universe is flat, a fact brought home to me at the Paris Cosmology Colloquium in 2009.
At first I thought the presenters were joking, but of course they weren't.
My incredulity at the echo of ancient naivete cost me a lot of points among the eminent scientists there, who all assured me that I didn't understand the topography. Today it seems a few forward thinkers are leaning to the strong possibility that the Universe isn't flat after all, so five years on I'm relieved to be counting some friends on Twitter who share a similar sense of humour at what is hopefully a passing phase. This time, however, it was no myth, and history will have it for the record that a Flat Universe was a genuine, bona-fide belief shared by an awful lot of highly respected people of the Earth.
This is what NASA has to say: "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error."
Later this year, bearing in mind that there isn't much left of 2013, Comet Ison will blaze across our skies, riding a wall of death past the Sun which could prove fatal and puts this celestial beauty in the wistful category of Sungrazers. There are stories abounding that Ison has companions, but these claims are unconfirmed and being argued as I write. Comets Lovejoy and Elenin slid past relatively unnoticed in 2011, while Hale-Bopp notoriously enjoyed far more recognition in 1997. David Dickinson writes for Universe Today; here a compilation of comet capers can be found among his frustrated efforts to debunk the collection of current myths. Comets can, in truth, destroy planets at a year's notice.
Now I don't know about you, but the fact that comets contain a lot of organic compounds and orbit the solar system in a kind of deep-frozen state seems to me at the very least to be intriguing. That all the celestial bodies we have ever discovered are basically spherical with orbital motions suggests to me that there is a case for the very small (electrons, for instance) mirroring the very big (like, for example, the Universe). We have no idea what shape an electron might be but whatever it may look like, it certainly demonstrates motion around the atomic nucleus. Bohr's model of atoms portrayed the arrangement looking very much like a solar system. Yes, it seems we were wrong then, too, and that atoms don't really look like that after all, because there are newly found parameters which need new explanations. At the end of the day, the shape of the electron and the Universe is all very interesting, and I'll be following avidly. But I think on the whole, as a social matrix of thinking people, we care more about how to live our lives in peace and find some inner contentment, how to make Earth a healthier planet and what we can do to stop our species from destroying its celestial home. If a comet comes along to do that for us, then we won't have to take the blame for our unending ignorance after all.
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