Columbus

I'm reading a book about Christopher Columbus. Let's put ourselves in his head for a moment, and believe that in sailing west from Europe across the Atlantic, he had reached India, rather than the New World. Why then, did he call it the West Indies? That doesn't make any kind of sense. He had clearly reached the most easterly point of India. Anybody who thinks that that sounds reasonable, and that it makes sense to speak of "India in the West" is either trying to make me angry, or has not properly understood the concept of the spherical Earth with it's arbitrary meridians.

Update: Geoff falls into at least one of the above categories. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.