Instead of trying to view an object only 18 inches from the water's surface Wallace proposed that there should be two poles placed in the river, one at the 3 mile mark and one at the 6 mile mark, both protruding from the surface of the water by 12 feet. Wallace, being scientifically minded and knowledgable in the physics known at the time, saw the issue of refraction over the surface of the water and rewrote the experiment. What this means is that the air over the water acts like a convex lens, bending light rays around the curve of the Earth, with enough of a difference between the temperature of the water and the air above it, it would be enough to negate the 6 feet of 'bulge' normally observed over that distance.Įnter Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist more famously known for working with Darwin on the theory of evolution, answering a wager in a magazine to prove the curve of the Earth and disprove Rowbotham. Cold water on a warm day (or evening) can cause quite a significant gradient of atmospheric density just immediately over the water, well up to a height of a few feet. You would think so, but as with most things in real life it's not that clear cut. On the face of it Rowbotham's proposal is a very clear and a reasonable one, over the distance of 6 miles there should be a 6ft bulge in the Earth, so if you have a man stand with his eyes 18 inches from the surface of the water and hang a lamp from the stern of a boat so that it is 18 inches from the water and row out along the river then the lamp should be completely obscurred by the 3 mile mark, so when the lamp was still visible at the 6 mile mark it was a fairly convincing win for the flat Earth society, right? The Bedford level is a stretch of river perfectly straight and perfectly level for a length of 6 miles in the east of England.
The first one suggests that he knew exactly what he was doing and how to manipulate not only the variables but also the people into backing up his claims. Rowbotham is also famous for a couple of experiments that he performed to prove that the Earth is flat. The expansion of the 14 pages to 430 pages could very well be the first example of a flat Earther taking 2 or 3 hours to explain a concept that should only take 30 seconds to explain and the same again to tear apart. This is just two internal inconsistencies in the book.īefore we move from the book to other things 'Parallax' is famous for I would like to just point out that the original Zetetic Astronomy: Earth not a Globe was a 14 page pamphlet. He also fails to explain why the woman in the short garments has her legs disappear first but the sun doesn't do the same. He also states that the sun approaches the vanishing point on the horizon explaining why it appears to disappear over the horizon, but interestingly he doesn't explain why, if the sun doesn't reduce to an optical diameter of nothing as it reaches vanishing point the woman in the short garments walking away does. For instance perspective has been bastardised to explain the disappearance of ships bottom first over the horizon by claiming that object below the eyeline converge faster than above the eyelevel. The biggest issue any remotely scientifically literate person reading this would have is that whilst the ideas put forward could explain away circumstances that can happen at certain times none if it actually holds together. This book contains many of these such bastardisations, aall aimed at answering just one of the many objections to the idea that the Earth could be flat. I shouldn't need to go any deeper into this as we're all familiar with this image. The book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth not a Globe is a 430 page treatise proposing that Earth is a round disc enclosed in a dome, with the north pole in the centre and a wall of ice reaching up the edges of the dome. Probably the most famous and certainly one of the first modern proponents of the flat Earth conjecture, Rowbotham lived in Victorian era Britain, and he is responsible for publishing the bastardised idea of perspective that flat Earthers today hold onto like a dogma. But what about the proponents of flat Earth? Most of us know of these people but how much do we know about them? A scientist's beliefs are often dragged through the mud to try and discredit them, I cannot any longer count the number of times I've heard someone try discredit Newton because he believed in alchemy or discrediting Einstein because people didn't get on with the guy. For obvious reasons globe Earthers concentrate on the actual observations, science and the theories around the Earth and how they work, but flat Earthers often resort to mud flinging about the scientists that have been clever enough to define our world.