Category: Cosmography

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

• 180-degree plane – Claim that the equator is a 90-radian circle forming one flat plane that contains all land.
• The age of the Earth – Kelvin cooled the planet from first principles and got twenty-four million years. His own former assistant had the right answer in 1895, and let it go.
• Dr. Ambrose Aird – Victorian gentleman-amateur (1809–1884) who revived Lorimer's abandoned method to prove the flat plane, and fitted it with a correction that could not fail.
• Anaximander – The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things – and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• Babylonian Map of the World – The oldest known map of the whole world – a clay disc ringed by a "Bitter River", and so also the oldest flat-earth map.
• 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.
• Tycho Brahe – Danish astronomer (1546–1601) whose geo-heliocentric system kept the Earth central while agreeing with the sky exactly – the Concordant Orrery's trick, three centuries early.
• Cartography – The making of flat maps of a surface that is not flat.
• Celestial theodolite – A flat-Earth method that measures atmospheric refraction with great care and records it as the absence of curvature.
• Circle – The set of points at one fixed distance from one point. A curve, not the region it encloses, and the definition several doctrines here decline to read.
• The CMB dipole – The warm side of the sky: a 3.4 millikelvin asymmetry caused entirely by our own motion, and used to calibrate the instruments that measure it.
• The Concordant Orrery – The Aetheric Concord's late mechanical model of the flat cosmos – built to need no globe mathematics, and set entirely from the globe's own almanac.
• Nicolaus Copernicus – Renaissance astronomer (1473–1543) who set the Earth in motion around the Sun – the geocentric and flat traditions' founding antagonist – and published as he died.
• The Counter-Earth – A tenth planet, placed where nobody could see it. Nine bodies were visible, ten is the perfect number, and the Pythagoreans made up the difference.
• Deflection of the vertical – Down does not point at the centre of the Earth. The plumb line leans towards whatever rock is nearby, by a few seconds of arc, and the lean is a map.
• The doctrinal value of π – The belief that π ought to be a clean, rational number – most often 3.2 – once very nearly fixed by a vote of the Indiana legislature.
• Earth – The third planet, and the one thing every other article here is about: an oblate spheroid since antiquity, flattened and taken personally ever since.
• Egyptian cosmology – The world of Geb and Nut: a flat earth and an arched sky, held apart by a god posted permanently between them.
• Eight inches per mile, squared – The flat-Earth drop rule – a correct approximation of the Earth's curvature, cited chiefly by people who then fail to find it.
• The figure of the Earth – The measured shape of the planet, and the long labour of measuring it.
• The Final Experiment – The December 2024 expedition that took flat-earthers and their critics to Antarctica to watch the Sun decline to set.
• Firmament – The solid dome of the sky in ancient and biblical cosmology – figurative to most, load-bearing to the Aetheric Concord.
• Flat – Of no curvature anywhere – a plane. A stronger condition than 'level' or 'horizontal': a tilted floor is flat but not level, and still water is level but not flat.
• Flat Earth – The cosmographies that decline the curvature of the Earth – the umbrella under which the encyclopedia's several flat doctrines are gathered.
• Gai tian – The oldest Chinese cosmology: a round heaven canopy over a flat, square earth – and the gnomon that measured its height.
• Gas pressure needs a container – The objection that an atmosphere cannot sit against a vacuum unheld. The premise is right; the lid is not. The container is gravity, and it leaks anyway.
• Geocentrism – The doctrines that decline the motion of the Earth, holding it fixed at the centre of things.
• Josiah Grimble – Irritable founder & secretary of the Aetheric Concord (1799–1872), who admitted only those who agreed and consigned objections “to the midden.”
• Heliocentrism – The Earth goes round the Sun: correct, and believed for very nearly three centuries before anyone could show it.
• Hindu cosmology – The Puranic world: a vast flat disc of ring-continents around Mount Meru, set in cycles of time a single day of which outlasts the Earth's age.
• Hollow Earth – A shell around a space, proposed by an Astronomer Royal because Newton had the Moon too heavy, and disproved by weighing a mountain in Perthshire.
• Horizontal – The plane perpendicular to the plumb line – flat, and tangent to the level surface, but true only where it is taken; two distant horizontals are not parallel.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• Johannes Kepler – German astronomer (1571–1630) who found the planets move in ellipses, after first building a lovelier, wrong model of nested Platonic solids; a founder of modern optics.
• Kinematic and dynamic equivalence – Two claims about reference frames: the first true and never disputed, the second contested, the two offered as one.
• Level – The geodetic sense of the word: a surface everywhere perpendicular to gravity, and therefore – over any distance – curved. Still water is the demonstration.
• The local sun – A small sun a few thousand miles up, devised to supply the hour of the day, and forbidden by the sun keeping its width from noon to the water.
• Moon – The Earth's satellite, and its measuring instrument: one face turned to us, and the wrong reading of its density once hollowed out the planet.
• The Mud Geometer – Bavarian controversialist (c. 1815 – after 1871) who would credit no curvature he could not be handed across a table, and drew, by his own hand, the plates that were meant to prove it.
• The myth of the flat Earth – That medieval Europe thought the world flat is a Victorian invention, assembled from a novelist's fiction and put to work in the quarrel over evolution.
• Norse cosmology – The walled middle-world of the Eddas: a flat Midgard ringed by the world-serpent and roofed with a giant's skull.
• Obed – Cosmographer of remote antiquity who raised one tower to confirm what he already believed, and cut his stone tablets at the dictation of a familiar spirit.
• One times one equals two – A claim about arithmetic, refuted in one line. The interesting part is what it would cost, since mathematics changes its rules often and states the price.
• Orbits – A fall that keeps missing. The space station drops 4.32 metres a second, and over the 7.66 km it covers meanwhile, its own orbit drops 4.32 metres.
• Ptolemy – Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years – its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.
• Ezekiel Quartz – Aetheric theorist (1828–1887), the Aetheric Concord's self-styled Defender of the Aether, who reduced all of physics to one medium and dared the world to refute him.
• Joost van Radewijn – Frisian harbour-pilot (1801–1869) who founded whole-radian geometry and reverse-engineered the Earth from a radian.
• Radian – The standard SI unit of plane angle (≈ 57.2958°) – and the encyclopedia's most misread object.
• The Radian Dyke – Frisian sea-dyke at Harlingen, reckoned the centrepoint of the flat plane, from which van Radewijn rowed one radian towards the rim of the world and did not return.
• Valerian Reeve – Cosmographer-host (c. 1801–1869), keeper of the Telluric Athenaeum, who held a flat earth gently, published nothing, and was never seen outside the room.
• Samuel Rowbotham – English founder of modern flat-Earth doctrine (1816–1884), whose 'zetetic' method sought a flat world from a fixed conclusion – and whose canal experiment measured only refraction.
• Sphere – The set of points at one fixed distance from one point in space. A surface, not the solid it bounds, and no part of it will lie flat.
• Stellar parallax – The annual shift demanded as proof of the Earth's motion in 1543, not found for 295 years, and there the whole time.
• Sun – The nearest star, and the one this encyclopedia keeps calling as a witness: never quite where it is seen, and gone from the horizon before it looks it.
• Cyrus Teed – Held that we live on the inside of the Earth, and surveyed four miles of Florida beach to prove it. The instrument sagged, and the sea came up to meet it.
• The Telluric Athenaeum – Latitudinarian athenaeum (est. 1849) that honoured every cosmography equally, converted no one, and was indistinguishable, in its records, from its keeper.
• Three-body problem – The problem of three bodies under mutual gravitation: no solution in closed form, and three centuries of correct predictions regardless.
• Value of one radian – The doctrinal claim that one radian is 57.30 nautical miles, obtained from 360 ÷ 2π.
• Whole-radian geometry – Discredited system in which a circle holds 360 radians, a radian is a distance, and a turn is 4π.

← All categories