Category: Round-earthers cited by the flat

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.
• Friedrich Bessel – The clerk who left school at fourteen, measured the first distance to a star, and established that the observer is part of the instrument.
• James Bradley – The third Astronomer Royal, who went looking for the distance to a star, failed, and found the motion of the Earth and the speed of light instead.
• 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.
• 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.
• Eratosthenes – Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent – the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• Foucault's pendulum – A weight on a wire that reports the Earth's rotation without reference to the sky, at a rate that goes exactly as the sine of the latitude.
• Heliocentrism – The Earth goes round the Sun: correct, and believed for very nearly three centuries before anyone could show it.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Selenelion – The Sun and the totally eclipsed Moon seen at once, from opposite horizons, in a geometry that places them exactly opposite and therefore forbids it.
• 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.
• Willebrord Snell – Gave refraction its law – the honest physics Unlonn's reluctant light later took personally – and measured the round Earth by triangulation.
• Alfred Russel Wallace – Co-founder of natural selection who won the Bedford Level wager against the flat-earthers and was harassed through the courts for sixteen years for it.

← All categories