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■ science
There is a popular myth that when Christopher Columbus took to the seas in 1492, people feared he might sail right off the edge of the world, in the mistaken belief that the world was flat. In actuality, no one believed that. The people of the fifteenth century were well aware that the Earth was not flat. The shape and even the size of the Earth has been a matter of accepted science since the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene demonstrated this by comparing the Sun’s relative position at two different locations on the Earth’s surface.
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