Obscuripedia, the Free Obscure Encyclopedia

From today’s featured article

Quirin Merker (c. 1812–1873) attended the meetings of nine learned societies for forty-one years, presented nothing to any of them, and kept a private ledger of who had won. (Full article…)

Recently featured: Radian · Hindu cosmology · Ernst Mach

Did you know…

… that for a quarter of a century after the international mile was agreed, Britain and the United States were each sailing on a different one, all three called the nautical mile?
… that the trick the Mountains of Kong played on the nineteenth century still works, and that Sandy Island, struck from French charts in 1974, lasted another thirty-eight years in the world's standard coastline data before a ship sailed to it in 2012 and sounded 1,300 metres of water?
… that when the pendulum was doubted, Léon Foucault answered by inventing a second instrument that showed the same thing, and gave it the name gyroscope?
… that J. J. Thomson won a Nobel Prize for showing the electron is a particle and his son George won one for showing it is a wave, and that both were right?
… that the world-serpent of Norse cosmology is the only thing in the whole cosmos given an exact dimension – being precisely as long as the world is round?

The Register

The last seal struck – 179 entries sealed0000cf90e42e6366d0b1cfbb012d55bab2440fb0cfb0ec999b6bab4938057719

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.

Inspect the Register →

In the news

The constant of stubbornness remains unmeasured for a further year. A spokesperson confirms the constant "is where it is."
The records of three societies of reluctant optics are found to show the Mud Geometer as both expelled and never admitted. All three decline to resolve the discrepancy, on the ground that resolving it would require readmitting him.
The forty-three seconds of arc that Vulcan was invented to explain are again offered as an unsolved problem. They were solved in 1915, by a theory with no planet in it.
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

23 September

1869 – Valerian Reeve, keeper of the Telluric Athenaeum, dies at the autumnal equinox without leaving the room, in what was judged a balanced aspect.

Recently insisted upon

The wiki grows. Pages appear; positions, less reliably.

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.

Browse by category

179 articles · 1 verified martyr · ∞ objects currently not where they ought to be

All positions approximate and subject to revision. If a page is not where this page says it is, that is itself a finding.

Disclaimer – this wiki is a work of satire and fiction.