Bill Nye’s Knowledge of Science Could Benefit From a Visit to Wikipedia

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses.

Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in around 150 AD), he would have known that the ancients understood very well that the universe is incomprehensibly vast. Here is the Summary of Ptolemy’s Cosmos from that article:

The cosmology of the Syntaxis includes five main points, each of which is the subject of a chapter in Book I. What follows is a close paraphrase of Ptolemy’s own words from Toomer’s translation.

The celestial realm is spherical, and moves as a sphere.
The Earth is a sphere.
The Earth is at the center of the cosmos.
The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.
The Earth does not move.

The “the ancients thought the universe was tiny” myth and the “the ancients thought the earth was flat” myth are both refuted by the Almagest.  The persistence of these myths is difficult to explain given that it takes about 30 seconds on Google to find the Wiki article.

But apparently Bill Nye is so busy spouting his anti-Christian propaganda, he does not have 30 seconds to spare.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that Nye’s ignorance is all the more inexcusable because it is not like he is unaware of Ptolemy. Nye once said:

It was curiosity that drove Ptolemy to study the stars and eventually develop the theory that the sun revolved around the Earth, and it was curiosity that eventually led Copernicus to challenge him centuries later and suggest it was actually the other way around. 

Yes, Ptolemy was wrong about that. But he was right about other things, like the fact that the earth is a sphere and that the universe is very very large.

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