Category: Physicists

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• George Biddell Airy – The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
• Maurice Allais – Nobel economist (1911–2010) who spent fifty-eight years on a pendulum and defended another man's data against the explanation that later took his own.
• Albert Einstein – German-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955) whose relativity dispensed with the aether – and who, told Dayton Miller had found it, said only that the Lord is subtle but not malicious.
• Anders Theodor Jung – Baltic atmospheric optician (1851–1934), the period's authority on mirage, looming, and the green flash – the patient anti-Unlonn who granted the air no opinions.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• Hendrik Lorentz – Dutch physicist (1853–1928) who tried to save the aether by letting moving bodies contract – and supplied the transformations Einstein used to abolish it.
• Ernst Mach – The arch-empiricist whose principle the aetherists kept and whose scepticism the flat-earthers mistook for permission – the man who doubted the atom, claimed by those who doubt the curve.
• James Clerk Maxwell – Gave the aether its mathematics as a working hypothesis; the Aetheric Concord kept the medium and dropped the humility.
• Dayton Miller – Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
• Isaac Newton – English natural philosopher (1643–1727) whose universal gravitation the flat-Earth tradition never forgave, and who spent as much effort on alchemy and biblical chronology as on physics.
• Max Planck – Founded quantum theory by an assumption he called an act of despair, spent years trying to undo it, and wrote the standard account of why converts are slow.
• Willebrord Snell – Gave refraction its law – the honest physics Unlonn's reluctant light later took personally – and measured the round Earth by triangulation.
• Nikola Tesla – Serbian-American inventor (1856–1943) of the alternating-current world, and the last great holdout for the luminiferous aether, who called relativity 'a mass of error.'
• Thomas Young – The physician who established that light is a wave, took the first real steps into hieroglyphs, and published much of it anonymously to protect his practice.

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