The Wikipedian Labyrinth

I watched a video yesterday of how to calibrate and align an equatorial mount for a telescope. Today, because of that video and its mention of latitude and longitude, I found myself doing a little research on how exactly the GPS system works. While pursuing that, Wikipedia informed me that the Greek man Eratosthenes was credited with one of the first real world maps. I swore I had just recently heard that name, and so my curiosity led me to look him up. There, I found he was considered the first person to calculate the circumference of the earth which I then remembered was mentioned in a flat-earth debunking video I watched 3 or 4 days ago from Vsauce. Anyway, I wanted to see this ancient world map. Luckily, there was a wiki page for just such curiosity. After travelling there, I found that the first world maps assuming a spherical earth was in the Hellenistic period. Still thinking of the flat-earth video and knowing only a loose description of the Hellenistic period, I decided to research it more. I found that it’s considered the period between the death of Alexander the Great and the beginning of the Roman Empire widely considered to have been born at the battle of Actium. I’d heard that battle’s name before, but knew next to nothing about it, so I looked it up. And then, of course, I had to follow numerous links further links to see WHY the battle happened in the first place. WOW. No wonder drama is so attributed to Greek culture. Holy damn, they were good at it. The ancient Greeks and Roman empire is one of those things where the truth sounds made up, like an embellished movie plot with added twists that never actually happened. It looks whatever the historical equivalent of ‘photoshopped’ is - changed to make it look more appealing, though I don’t actually believe it was. That would have been a crazy time and place to be alive. Going into heavy research a few years ago of Socrates who taught Pluto who taught Aristotle who taught Alexander the Great, Ptolemy (Pharaoh of Egypt), and Cassander (King of Macedon) showed me a similar research experience. If it were a fiction book, I’d commend it for being thrilling and at times heart pounding, full of truly surprising twists and fascinating characters. It also lends itself well to contemplation of Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect. With all those extremely powerful and world-altering people in connection with each other, imagine how different the world would be if Socrates had died in childbirth. Maybe if the midwife who delivered him took a step slightly different on her way to the delivery and twisted her ankle, causing her absence at the birth, causing the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck to go unnoticed until too late. Think of the difference to the world a single step 2 inches to the wrong side of a cobblestone could have made. We’d have no Socrates. No founding of western philosophy. Pluto and Aristotle likely would have been nobody worth remembering, and the story of Alexander the Great might have played out much differently without a truly remarkable teacher. Alex changed arguably more than any of the others with his influence on what the Roman Empire became. The story of Alexander the Great and the people involved is just as fascinating and unbelievable as the fall of the Roman Republic. I really need to make research of that period in particular a priority. What incredible fodder for inspiration, and though these are true stories, for creativity and imagination. Side note, somewhere along the way I also found myself on the ‘Dead Reckoning’ wiki page. No idea how I got there, but it has to do somewhat with early cartography, so sometime around the world map research, probably. Probably one of maybe 20-25 wiki pages read this session over 2 hours or so. Such are the dangers of wikipedia for a curious mind.

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