The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 2: Columbus and Copernicus

Science and the Discovery of America

We all know the story – some may have even heard it in school – of the brave Columbus defending the theory that the earth is round against ignorant clerics arguing that the world was flat. Of course, this never happened.

Columbus’s encounter with America was not the result of his being right about science where everyone else was wrong, but of his being wrong where most educated people of his time were much closer to the truth. The key issue was not the shape but the size of the earth. The idea of sailing west to get to the rich lands of East Asia was not new to Europeans in the late fifteenth century.

What had stopped it before Columbus was the fear that ships and crews could not survive such a long journey out of sight of land. The objections made to Columbus by experts also included the fear that the curvature of the earth would prevent a return voyage, and that parts of the earth over which the expedition would have to sail were uninhabitable.

Columbus had to "cook the books" outrageously to deal with the objection based on distance. He exaggerated the eastward extent of Asia, and used land rather than nautical miles to calculate the area covered by a degree of longitude, in addition to other "fudge factors." (This is neither the first nor last time strict scientific accuracy has been sacrificed by someone looking for a government grant, but few other times would be as important.)

Columbus’s estimate of the distance between the Canary Islands and Japan, the departure and arrival points of his expedition, was only twenty percent of the actual distance. (If America had not existed, Columbus and his expedition would have died of hunger and thirst somewhere in the middle of the ocean between Europe and America.) The flatness of the earth myth arose centuries later, as part of a campaign by nineteenth century Protestants and liberals to ridicule the science of the Catholic Middle Ages.

Whatever the dodginess of Columbus’s geography, the discovery of America had immense consequences for European science and knowledge. Long open-sea voyages made navigational problems, particularly the calculation of the longitude, more pressing. The exploitation of the Americas, following the conquest or genocide of their peoples, required new knowledge.

Many plants, animals and minerals were completely new to Europeans, and identifying and cataloging them was the work of centuries. The discovery also mattered on a less pragmatic level, as an example of what remained yet to be known. It would become a stock instance appealed to by those who wanted to claim that "modern" society had advanced beyond the ancients.

When the English philosopher Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Knowledge, in which he argued for a coordinated research program to advance both human knowledge and human power over nature, he included a title page illustration showing ships sailing out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, symbolically leaving behind the circumscribed Greek and Roman world. Shapin reproduces this image on page 21.

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