Category: Flat-Earth 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.
• The Aetheric Concord – Dr. Aird's 1855 society for proving the flat plane – the exact mirror of the Bavarian Society, and never once known to disagree.
• 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.
• 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.
• Celestial theodolite – A flat-Earth method that measures atmospheric refraction with great care and records it as the absence of curvature.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• Josiah Grimble – Irritable founder & secretary of the Aetheric Concord (1799–1872), who admitted only those who agreed and consigned objections “to the midden.”
• 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 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.
• 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 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.
• Lucian Sheen – The self-styled 'contrary advocate' who insisted he was a man of the globe and, across twenty years, only ever argued the plane.
• Whole-radian geometry – Discredited system in which a circle holds 360 radians, a radian is a distance, and a turn is 4π.

← All categories