Can Experiments Shake our Faith in the Flat Earth Theory?
There is a way of mapping the allegedly round globe onto a flat piece of paper which is the stereographic azimuthal projection. To do this we make the line which joins each point on earth with its corresponding point on the map begin at the south pole.(The south pole actually needs to be mapped onto an extra point.) (Wilhelmy, ch. 1, p. 43. A similar mathematical construction is often called “The one point compactification of the plane” ) When we use this projection to make a map we generally confine ourselves to only one hemisphere. If we didn’t, we’d get a map that looked something like this. We’ve not included more of Antarctica (which would appear as a giant ring surrounding the whole world) because then we’d have had to shrink the northern hemisphere to a dot in order to fit everything onto the screen. And to show the whole of Antarctica the screen would have to be infinitely large. Can we claim that our flat, distorted map represents reality, that the world isn’t, in fact, spheri
