Category: Positions resting on a single sensation

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

• 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.
• Flat Earth – The cosmographies that decline the curvature of the Earth – the umbrella under which the encyclopedia's several flat doctrines are gathered.
• General relativity – A theory of gravitation containing no force of gravity, built out of the fact that a falling man feels nothing at all.
• Geocentrism – The doctrines that decline the motion of the Earth, holding it fixed at the centre of things.
• 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.
• N-rays – A radiation emitted by almost everything, reported in three hundred papers, and detected throughout by looking at a faint light and deciding it had brightened.
• A. Sterling Sill – Victorian gentleman (1821–1879) of independent means and a single proposition – that the horizontal does not slope – which is locally true, globally fatal, and as far as he ever got.
• Vic Tandy – Traced a haunted laboratory to its extractor fan using a fencing foil, and published it in the ghost journal. The famous 19 Hz is 1,139 divided by 60.
• The 21 grams experiment – A bed on beam scales and six dying patients. The number everyone knows comes from one of them, and reached print only because a newspaper got there first.
• Vulcan – A planet announced, named, decorated and assigned an orbit to the arcminute, between Mercury and the Sun, that was never there.

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