Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College is a sprawling campus of 31,527 students and 6,500 staff in Baton Rouge, La. In recent years that university, colloquially known as LSU, has been involved in multiple historic scientific and medical breakthroughs.
In fact, the journal SCIENCE, called the discovery of gravitational waves, as part of the LIGO experiments in Louisiana and Washington state, the “2016 Breakthrough of the Year” and it wouldn’t have been possible without the 1,000-member project team, many of whom are presently part of the LSU Department of Physics.
One of the leaders of that project, LSU Physics and Astronomy professor Gabriela Gonzalez, was named one of the Top 10 scientists in the world by NATURE.
This all happened right after three LSU physicists were awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for discovering neutrino oscillations. It was worth a cool $3 million for LSU, thanks to the work of Thomas Kutter, Martin Tzanov and William Metcalf.
Louisiana State also fields 21 varsity sports teams loaded with student athletes. One of their most famous alums is four-time NBA champion and 2000 NBA MVP Shaquille O’Neal. He spent three years walking the hallowed halls of LSU, a school founded in 1853, with a current $788 million endowment, and believes, wholeheartedly, that the planet Earth in which we all live on is flat.
Yeah. This shit again.
Back in February, Cleveland Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving made that claim and we all had us a good laugh at his expense. I mean, that guy. Right?
But now Shaquille O’Neal has jumped his well-lotioned Sasquatch-ian body into the ring, to share his thoughts on how this whole round Earth thing is just another lie “they” are teaching in school.
“It’s true,” Shaq says on his podcast about a month ago. “The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. Yes, it is. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind; what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, first thing they teach us is, ‘Oh, Columbus discovered America,’ but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with the long hair smoking peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn’t discover America. So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this shit is flat to me. I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat.”
There’s a whole lot to unpack there and I feel Shaq has gotten a lot of his information from cartoons.
Back when Irving first spouted his flat Earth theories, I mentioned that the spherical Earth has been common knowledge since about 600 years or so before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, believed the Earth was flat for millennium. The biggest issue for most of the post-Jesus time when it came to the Earth wasn’t it’s roundness, everybody knew that, but whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe and everything (the sun, stars, all the planets) revolved around it, or if the Earth was a planet and revolved around the sun.
The idea that the Earth was just another planetary body was the revolutionary theory that got Copernicus and Galileo in trouble with the Catholic Church. Not a spherical Earth.
So where do we get this bullshit that anyone believed the Earth was flat at any point since human civilization actually began?
Because somebody just made it up. And that somebody was named Washington Irving. Irving is one of the most famous American writers in history. You can thank him for stories like “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and plenty of other tales you probably read in school but remember more from Bugs Bunny and Disney cartoons. We’re all a lot like Shaq that way.
One of Irving’s most popular books was A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, and if you don’t come to think this is ironic after Shaq brought up Columbus in his flat Earth rant, well, you probably studied English literature at LSU.
It was Irving, just making it up completely out of his ass, that came up with the idea that anyone, anywhere, thought the Earth was flat. It was just bullshit he created to make his book more fun. And, somehow, because people are generally dumb and lazy and don’t read real history, that idea stuck.
And not only did it stick, it’s circled around on itself to become a conspiracy theory. THEY don’t want us to know the Earth is flat. But Shaq hasn’t been fooled.
Now, just don’t ask him if the Moon is closer to him than the state of California.
To make a wager on any sport, go to the world famous Diamond Sportsbook by clicking here.
