We all know by now Columbus was a monster. But this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, let’s talk about something more down to Earth. Literally.
Do schools still teach that Columbus was the first to discover that Earth is round?
Because that’s totally bogus. The Vikings had sailed to the “new world” centuries before Columbus. And the ancient Greeks knew of our planet’s roundness way before that.
One ancient Greek astronomer, Eratosthenes, even calculated Earth’s circumference without ever crossing an ocean. And he did it sometime around 240 BC. That’s, like, way before 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Even more interesting is how Eratosthenes did it. He determined Earth’s circumference by looking at shadows cast by two sticks in the ground a known distance apart. (Okay, sure, there was a bit of math and geometry involved, BUT STILL.)
It would be easy to think the takeaway from this is that we should stay in school, study math and science, and aspire to be as smart as Eratosthenes.
But don’t miss the big picture here. The more important takeaway is to realize that when Eratosthenes looked at a shadow cast by a stick, he didn’t just see a shadow. He saw the whole world. And not in some abstract, poetic, or philosophical manner. He saw the entire world, quantified.
There is something remarkable in every mundane thing you will encounter today. Whether you see it is completely up to you. You don’t have to be smart like Eratosthenes. You just need to open your eyes like Eratosthenes.
Change your world. See something remarkable today.