Category: Discredited doctrines

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 Allison effect – A method of chemical analysis whose detector was a person watching a spark for a dimming. It found two elements, and neither of them is there.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Reluctant light – Discredited 19th-century doctrine that light arrives where it pleases.
• 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.
• Vulcan – A planet announced, named, decorated and assigned an orbit to the arcminute, between Mercury and the Sun, that was never there.
• 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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