Category: Cosmography

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Earth — The third planet, and the one object every other article here is about — an oblate spheroid measured to within a few percent in antiquity, and flattened, stationed, 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.
• 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 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.
• Geocentrism — The doctrines that decline the motion of the Earth, holding it fixed at the centre of things.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The Radian Dyke — Frisian sea-dyke at Harlingen, reckoned the centrepoint of the flat plane, from which van Radewijn rowed one radian toward the rim of the world and did not return.
• Valerian Reeve — Mild cosmographer-host (c. 1801–1869), keeper of the Telluric Athenaeum and known as the Tutelar; held a flat, stationary earth gently, published nothing, and was never observed 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.
• The Telluric Athenaeum — Latitudinarian athenaeum (est. 1849) that honoured every cosmography equally, converted no one, and sat in a single unending conversazione — indistinguishable, in its records, from its keeper.
• Whole-radian geometry — Discredited system in which a circle holds 360 radians, a radian is a distance, and a turn is 4π.

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