ABSTRACT
This chapter provides set of experiments that lead to very different conclusions about how children – and indeed adults – learn the shape of the earth. As every educated grown-up knows, the earth is round and not flat. The idea that the earth is spherical in form is generally credited to Pythagoras and his school, in the sixth century BC, though it was the mystical perfection of the form rather than any empirical evidence that led them to it. Two centuries later, in his On the Heavens, Aristotle marshalled a series of physical arguments to prove why the earth must be round. And adduced as evidence both the curved shadow cast by the earth during a lunar eclipse and the changing inclination of the stars to the horizon as one travels northwards or southwards. According to dual earth model there are two earths, ‘a round one which is up in the sky and a flat one where people live’.
