Alejandro de Humboldt y el tercer viaje de Cristóbal Colón: ciencia y religión conjugados para un mismo propósito

Abstract

The European expansion and particularly the discovery of America modified the idea of the world and the man that inhabited it, with explanations about a period in transition from the Middle to the Modern Age, in which both religion and science coincided and differed. The author comments inside that context, Christopher Columbus' views on two scientific problems: the magnetic variation and the inflection of the isothermic lines. At the same time, he deals with a religious problem: the localization of the terrestrial paradise. These aspects were later discussed by the traveler and scientist Alejandro de Humboldt, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.