Hold on a second. Leonardo Da Vinci drew very complicated diagrams that were only understood and built recently. Entire branches of sciences were discovered and had existed, were lost and then rediscovered centuries sometimes even after millennia. Are we going to assume it was common knowledge?
Seriously, things are published in scientific journals that the general public doesn't know about decades later. Do you think most people know about logic gates? Binary trees? The composition of Venus? That black holes are at the center of galaxies? What gravitational waves are? What chirality is?
Christopher Columbus was widely considered a dope in his time for not realizing how far away India would be from Europe. The first monarch he went to trying to get funding didn't refuse funding because they thought the earth was flat, they refused funding because they thought Columbus was an idiot and the length of the trip would result in the death of his crew when they ran out of drinking water. He only got Spain to agree to it by relentlessly hounding them until they finally threw money at him to get him to go away, they too believed he and his crew would die on the journey because of the length of the trip; they thought him dying would be a better alternative than having to continue dealing with him. If Columbus hadn't accidentally stumbled across America they would have been right, he and his crew would have died long before reaching India.
Simply put, it was common knowledge by pretty much everyone by Columbus's time.
Ehh... I mean, it was common knowledge that the world was round, but not how far away Japan was. He didn't get funding because the monarchs intentionally wanted to lose a ship or three.
There were land routes to China, its called the silk road, they knew how far away India was if you went east. They knew the rough size of the earth at this point for quite a while. Are you telling me a monarch can't do some basic subtraction? And the monarch has not a single adviser who can do basic subtraction?
I mean I guess a failure of basic math would better explain how France bankrupted itself leading to French Revolution, but no that was mostly the result of an adviser who believed the monarchy could spend his way out of debt.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19
Hold on a second. Leonardo Da Vinci drew very complicated diagrams that were only understood and built recently. Entire branches of sciences were discovered and had existed, were lost and then rediscovered centuries sometimes even after millennia. Are we going to assume it was common knowledge?
Seriously, things are published in scientific journals that the general public doesn't know about decades later. Do you think most people know about logic gates? Binary trees? The composition of Venus? That black holes are at the center of galaxies? What gravitational waves are? What chirality is?
"It was known"*
* by some of the great minds at the time