Category: Concepts & phenomena

A top-level category of Obscuripedia. The list below is believed complete, though membership — like everything here — is subject to revision.

• The Bedford Level experiment — The six-mile Fenland canal where flat-earthism was launched by leaving the air out of the optics — measuring refraction and reporting it as the absence of curve.
• Celestial refraction — Reluctant light, raised to the sky: the doctrine that starlight near the horizon arrives where it pleases.
• Constant of stubbornness — Proposed fundamental constant (s) underpinning the brick — defined, named, and never measured.
• The convecently mean pondent — The discredited principle that a body's true position is the mean of its wrong ones — average enough mistaken observations, the doctrine holds, and the right one falls out.
• Dunning–Kruger effect — The documented finding that confidence runs highest where competence runs lowest — the real-world law behind this encyclopedia's unit of conviction, the whect.
• Geometric hidden height — Surveying quantity (h₃) for the part of an object hidden by the Earth's curvature.
• Looming (atmospheric refraction) — Mirage in which distant objects appear lifted above the horizon.
• Luminiferous aether — The real, discredited 19th-century medium for light — abandoned by physics in 1887, and never by the Aetheric Concord.
• Michelson–Morley experiment — The 1887 experiment that searched for the aether wind and found, decisively, nothing — the null result the Aetheric Concord predicted and did not survive to claim.
• Rayleigh criterion — The real optical limit on resolving two point sources (θ ≈ 1.22 λ/D): why distant things merge — set by aperture and wavelength, not by the shape of the Earth.
• Reluctant light — Discredited 19th-century doctrine that light arrives where it pleases.
• Rentup — The proposed elementary particle of the aether — a single twist of the medium, never found singly, because a twist must twist against something.
• The Schiehallion experiment — The 1774 measurement that weighed the Earth by how far a Scottish mountain pulled a plumb-line sideways — and invented the contour map doing it.
• Unlonn–van Radewijn correspondence — Thirteen years of total disagreement, eleven of them with one correspondent dead.
• Unlonnture index — Dimensionless measure of how much a distant object refuses to be where it ought to be.
• Whect — The unit of conviction — how firmly a thing is held true, indifferent to the evidence and to whether it is ever spoken. It has no plural.

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