ABSTRACT
The first speculators about our Earth were almost certainly flat-earthists. The persistence of popular belief in a flat Earth, the Earth was recognized to be a sphere at about the same time as Thales. The surprising reluctance of so-called Christendom to perceive Earth’s oneness with the rest of the universe must surely reflect on the timidity of its theologians faced with a popularly entrenched, and mathematically unfalsifiable, theory of the universe. In Aristotelianism, as in most other ancient cosmologies, Earth was at the very centre of the universe. Few more profound alterations in scientific perception have taken place than in the changing images of the Earth in space. In the 6th century bc the influential Greek philosopher Thales saw the Earth as a disc. Obsessed with the primacy of water in the universe, Thales proposed that this disc was floating on the ocean; a later member of his Ionian school, Anaximenes, thought the Earth floated on air, like a leaf.
