![]() (I have written an article on the movement’s history, drawing on Christine Garwood’s terrific 2007 account of it in Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea). In the years since, the Zetetic movement (as its members call it) has waxed and waned, becoming active under one charismatic leader or another, then falling dormant after that person’s death. He was, in his mind at least, a true sceptic. Rather than blindly accepting what he called the unproven theories of Copernicus and Newton, he claimed to have figured out the real state of the world from his own experiments. Rowbotham named his theory Zetetic, from the Greek zeteo, meaning to search or examine. ![]() And lunar eclipses are caused by an invisible anti-moon drifting in front of the moon. Sunrise, sunset and the disappearance of objects beyond the horizon are optical illusions. The sun and moon are small lights that circle the earth about four thousand miles above its surface. Antarctica does not exist, but a wall of ice surrounds the earth, preventing the oceans from draining off its edge. Rowbotham’s world is a disk centred on the North Pole. Since childhood, Rowbotham had believed that the earth is flat, and he claimed to have proved it in a series of experiments he performed on a stretch of Norfolk canal called the Bedford Level. It began in 1865, when Samuel Birley Rowbotham, an eccentric English inventor, alternative medicine enthusiast and publicity-seeker, published Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe under the pseudonym Parallax. Around 350 BC, Aristotle cited several proofs of a spherical Earth, such as the change in constellations from north to south, the disappearance of objects over the horizon, and the earth’s curved shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse.Īnd yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a tiny but persistent flat earth movement. The Flat Earth MovementĮducated people throughout Europe, the Middle East and western Asia have known for millennia that the earth is round. Worse, they can be reflexively sceptical towards any official, scientific or secular sources of information, and at the same time, extremely credulous towards outright crankery. While a certain amount of scepticism is healthy, conspiracy theorists and advocates of pseudoscience take scepticism to the extreme. American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that the flat earth movement is evidence that “we live in a country with a failed educational system.” But it seems more likely that such beliefs stem from a pathology of scepticism. To the overwhelming majority of us, modern flat earthers can come across as either totally uninformed or profoundly ignorant. The most rigorous data we have is from a 2018 YouGov poll of 8,125 American adults, which found that 84% of respondents were firmly committed to a spherical earth and 2% to a flat earth the remaining 12% had doubts or believed something else: small numbers, but not insignificant ones. ![]() It’s difficult to know how many people really believe the earth is flat, as many don’t take the question seriously. ![]() “I think it’s right to be sceptical about alternative views,” said Darren Nesbit, “but what we never are is sceptical about the mainstream view that we’re told since we were children.” He acknowledged that his perspective was not the mainstream one, but he said that, instead of accepting what we are taught in school, we should believe our own senses, which tell us that the earth is flat and stationary. In May 2018, three men went on the British ITV programme This Morning to explain why they believed the earth was flat.
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