Obscuripedia, the Free Obscure Encyclopedia

From today’s featured article

Moon is the Earth's only satellite and, for most of recorded history, its only measuring instrument: the scale of the system, the shape of an orbit and the rate of a clock were all read off it. So, once, was the inside of the Earth. (Full article…)

Recently featured: Celestial navigation · Dip of the horizon · The speed of light

Did you know…

… that a member of the Swedish Academy wrote to Leavitt in 1925 proposing to nominate her for the Nobel Prize, and that the letter was answered by her director, who explained that she had died four years earlier and that the important part of the work had been his?
… that almost nothing Philolaus wrote survives, so that everything known about his Counter-Earth – including the famous claim that he invented it to make the count come to ten – reaches us through a summary written by somebody arguing against him?
… that Cyrus Teed's survey was carried out with twelve-foot mahogany sections levelled one against the next, and that four miles of wood assembled that way cannot be straight?
… that the latitude of Null Island is a fact about the Earth's rotation and its longitude is the result of a vote, taken in Washington in 1884 and carried 22 to 1, with France abstaining?
… that the sun's apparent width does vary, by about three parts in a hundred – but over a year rather than a day, which is the wrong cycle for the local sun and the right one for an orbit that is slightly out of round?

The Register

The last seal struck – 180 entries sealed0003743ad5fd21eef58fa735ec4238a290aede3023700ad9190aa868276605d5

Every entry is sealed upon the entry before it, back to a line taken from a newspaper of 17 April 1847. Alter any one of them and every seal struck after it stops agreeing. The chain vouches for the order of the encyclopedia; it has never been asked to vouch for the contents.

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In the news

A celestial-theodolite reading once more returns the refraction of the air, which is once more reported as the absence of curvature.
A concave Earth is again asserted without measurement. It was measured once, along four miles of Florida beach in 1897, by people who believed in it and who built the instrument themselves. The instrument sagged, and the sea came up to meet it.
A demand is made for the single decisive observation that established heliocentrism. The reply, that there was none for two hundred years and the matter was settled anyway, is not found satisfactory.
A satellite of Venus is again reported. There is none. The last set of reports ran from 1645 to 1768, was made by very good observers, and was of Chi Orionis and four other ordinary stars.

Recently relocated: your car keys.

On this day

7 November

1913 – Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist and reluctant winner of the Bedford Level wager, dies at Broadstone, Dorset, having outlived by some years the man who would not concede the curve.

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What is Obscuripedia?

Obscuripedia documents the obscure, the marginal, and the technically real: the footnote sciences, the discredited indices, the instruments invented by one person and used by no one. Where ordinary encyclopedias require a subject to be notable, we require only that it be difficult to disprove.

It began with a drowned Bavarian optician and his reluctant light: correct observations, absurd explanations, identical mathematics. Around him grew a society that tried to prove the Earth flat by timing stars behind mountains, a brass orrery built to do without the mathematics it was set from, and a salon whose keeper was never observed to leave the room.

It has since grown outward into the science those subjects were misreading, and that half now stands on its own. How far away the Sun is, and how long that took to settle. Why satellites carry clocks set wrong on purpose. What the double slit does and does not show. The experiment that found nothing and mattered more for it. Each is filed, without comment, beside the doctrine that misread it.

Begin anywhere: Hieronymus Unlonn · the unlonnture index · the Brick · the selenelion · Vulcan · Occam’s razor.

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