It is often overlooked that "scientifically" Chirstopher Columbus was 100% wrong...

[redgreenandblue]

... and the church/great powers that refused him funding were correct to do so:

Columbus thought he could reach India because an Italian geographer, Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli, miscalculated the size of the earth by a factor of 4.

The Church, correctly sticking with Eratosthenes's estimate (mathematically sound and wrong by only 4%, not bad for an ancient greek!), predicted Columbus would never reach India with the ships available at the time, it was simply too far. Had a continent (unknown to both Columbus and the church) not been there, Columbus and his crew would never have returned alive.

So, "Columbus day" should be there to remind us that deep world-changing experimental results come from utterly wrong theories.

Happy bad theoretical physics day.

[KurtNYC]

1. Many discoveries are made by accident but we need not celebrate the "discovery" of

2 continents that were already home to 60 million human beings.

[FarCenter]

2. On the other hand, European fishermen probably had reached the Grand Banks by then

It's likely that some knowledge of lands west of Iceland was prevalent on the waterfront in northern European ports, even though the Church was clueless.

[klyon]

3. not only that

He was not first
and it led to the genocide of millions,
nothing to celebrate here move along.

[zipplewrath]

4. Columbus the Myth

There are many modern misconceptions about Columbus that exist within a rather uneducated population. My favorite being the whole "they thought the earth was flat" schtick. There was practically no one who knew anything about navigation or sailing that though the earth was flat. As you say, not only did they know it was round, but they knew roughly how big it was, except for Columbus apparently. And he as far from the first European to get there, at least in the sense of the American continent. And it is apparent that Africans had been there for some time.

[redgreenandblue]

5. When I was a kid, I watched "Conquest of Paradise",

thinking that that was basically how it happened. That movie is about as historically accurate as "Brave Heart".