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141 lines
7.4 KiB
HTML
141 lines
7.4 KiB
HTML
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<h1 id="title-index">theory</h1>
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<div id="conspiracy">
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<p>
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THE HOLLOW EARTH: A MADDENING THEORY THAT CAN'T BE DISPROVED
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From OMNI Magazine (October 1983), Games section (p. 128)</p>
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<p> If there were a hall of fame for pseudoscientists, surely Cyrus Teed
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would deserve a place of honor. It was shortly after the Civil War that
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Teed had his vision: The earth is a hollow sphere, and WE LIVE INSIDE
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IT. Everything else in the universe is in here with us -- planets,
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comets, stars -- everything. What's outside the sphere? Nothing.
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Teed's cosmology had a particular appeal to religious
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fundamentalists. It made the earth important again, rather than an
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insignifigant speck in the cosmos. And it eliminted the difficult
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concepts of infinite space and aimlessly scattered worlds. We're all
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right here together in this safe, spherical womb.
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In 1870 Teed changed his name to <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Koresh</span> (ancient Hebrew for Cyrus)
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and started a cult. At its peak in the Nineties the <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Koresh</span>an
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(pronounced ker-ESH-an) Unity movement had some 4000 followers. Teed
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established a religious/scientific community a few miles south of Fort
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Myers, Florida, and there founded the town of Estero. He was determined
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to prove his theory scientifically and launched his own geodetic survey
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in 1897 to do just that. Using his "rectilineator," a set of double-T
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squares made of large logs, he projected a horizontal line until his
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calculations indicated that it would plunge into the Gulf of Mexico,
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four miles from its starting point. This was Teed's proof that the
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earth's surface is concave and that his rectilineator line had
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intersected the earth's upward curve.
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The scientists had gotten everything backward: It is centrifugal
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force, not gravity, that keeps our feet planted on the ground. The
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sphere *is* about 25000 miles around, just as the scientists say.
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China is about 8000 miles away, through the earth's center -- straight
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up.
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The Nazis entertained many occult theories in their quest for world
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domination, and Teed's was one of them. At one point a Nazi expedition
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went to the Isle of Man. Its mission: to get secret photographs of the
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United States by pointing its powerful telescopes *up*.
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...
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What's most infuriating is that a little mathematical fiddling turns
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this crazy theory into a proposition that is virtually impossible to
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refute. The trick is done by *inversion*, a purely geometric
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transformation that lets a methemetician turn shapes inside-out. When a
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sphere is inverted, ever point outside is mapped to a corresponding
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point inside, and vice versa.
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The goemetry is quite simple. If a sphere's center is "C" and its
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radius is "r," then every outside point "P" maps to an inside point "P'"
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such that "CP x CP' = r2" {that's "r squared" - Foxx}.
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{My apologies for not being able to include the accompanying
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illustration. - Foxx}
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Here's a good way to visualize it: For any outside point "P" (on
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the sun, or Pluto, or Cygnus X, for example), draw a circle that has
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"CP" as its diameter. From one of the two points where this circle
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intersects the earth, draw a line perpendicular to "CP." The
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intersection point {of this perpendicular and "CP"} is the location of
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"P'".
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By far the largest body in our inverted Earth is the moon; a bit
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over half a mile in diameter and some 3933 miles over our heads. The
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sun's sphere is only eight feet across. The stars ar microscopic spots
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clustered around the center, which is, of course, infinity.
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Is there any way to prove we *aren't* inside a hollow earth? We
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asked H.S.M. Coxeter, mathematics professor at the University of
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Toronto and an expert on inversion geometry. "I can't think of any," he
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said. "A rocket flight, an eclipse, a Foucault pendulum, a Coriolis
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effect -- any observation we can makeon the outside of the earth has an
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exact duplicate version inside. There would be no way to tell which was
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the truth."
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Just as the geometry of space inverts, so do all the laws of
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physics. Toward the center of a hollow Earth, light slows down and
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everything shrinks -- atoms, astronauts, spaceships, and measuring rods.
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Light travels in circular paths, producing some weird (but lawful)
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optical effects. <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Astronauts</span> on the moon looked back on what they
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thought was a blue sphere in the distance. Actually it was the inside
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of the earth's shell, throught sight lines that flared like the bell of
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a trumpet, producing the *illusion* of a sphere. The optical distortion
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is something like the wide angle view through a fisheye lens.
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As we look to the sky and the horizons, our visual field is filled
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with a sphere some 4000 miles in diameter. Celestial bodies that
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revolve around the earth's center appear to "rise" and "set" as they
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enter or leave that sphere.</p>
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<p> Cyrus Teed said that the moon is an illusion, that gravity is really
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centrifugal force, and that a horizontal line on the earth's surface
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eventually intersects the earth's upward curvature. We like to think
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that if he were alive today he would junk some of his earlier
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predictions to conform to inverse geometry, thereby keeping his theory
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irrefutable.
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The centrifugal-force idea is demonstrably false. If it were so,
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there would be two points on the earth's surface where the force
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disappeared -- along the axis of spin. It is gravity of a peculiar kind
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that pulls us all to the outside. Teed's rectilineator experiment must
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have been in error. A line that appears horizontal actually curves in
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toward the center and so gets farther and farther "above" the surface.
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Teed would have embraced Einstein's view of a finite, bounded
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universe in which light travels in circles and eventually returns to its
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starting point. An infinitely powered telescope aimed straight up,
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Einstein said, will eventually produce a view of the other side of the
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earth. That idea might seem paradoxical to most of us, but it would
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have been intuitively obvious to Cyrus Teed.
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... the Australian Journal _Speculations in Science and Technology_
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has published an article by Mostafa A Abdelkader, of Alexandria, Egypt,
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that considers in all seriousness the proposal that we really *are* in a
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hollow Earth. Abdelkader says that the only way to test the theory's
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validity is to drill a tunnel straight through the earth. Until such an
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experiment is performed, he writes, "it seems ... that the odds are
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strongly in favor of [a hollow Earth] being our actual universe."
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</p>
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