As insane pseudo-science goes, the theory of the Hollow Earth is pretty
damned persistent. One night, over gravity bong hits as I recall,
thejAff and I were talking about the Nature of The Universe when I
whipped out my trusty Omni Book of Games. I remembered reading,
years ago, this gem of an article, which has now become sort of our running joke. But are we really joking? It turns out that by performing a geometric inversion
with respect to the sphere of the Earth, a model of the universe can be
constructed where all of infinite space -- hundred billion galaxies,
quasars, cosmic background radiation and all -- is located inside the
seven-thousand-mile-across shell of Earth. Light rays follow
corkscrew paths, the speed of light varies with distance from the
sphere's center, objects leaving Earth's surface become smaller and
smaller as they rise into the sky. Best part: you can't mathematically or geometrically prove this to be false.
It turns out that the Hollow Earth has a long and illustrious history,
and it did not always rest on such solid mathematical ground. One of
the earliest of these theories was proposed in 1692 by Edmund Halley.
Halley was fascinated by the earth's
magnetic field. He noticed the direction of the field varied
slightly over time and the only way he could account for this
was there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields. Halley
came to believe that the Earth was hollow and within it was
a second sphere with another field. In fact, to account for
all the variations in the field, Halley finally proposed that
the Earth was composed of some four spheres, each nestled inside
another.
Others picked up Halley's hollow-earth theory -
often adding their own twists. In the eighteenth century Leonhard
Euler, a Swiss mathematician, replaced the multiple spheres
theory with a single hollow sphere which contained a sun 600
miles wide that provided heat and light for an advanced civilization
that lived there.
Sounds like so much bullshit, right? Nevertheless, eyewitness accounts of the hollow earth exist, some from reputable sources. You can even book a tour, if you're so inclined.
Mostafa A Abdelkader, of Alexandria, Egypt, wrote a paper dealing
specifically with the geometric inversion hollow earth theory.
Abdelkader says that the only way to test the theory's validity is to drill a tunnel straight through the earth. It'll come out at the antipodal point or ... where? Until such an experiment is
performed, he writes, "it seems ... that the odds are strongly in favor of [a
hollow Earth] being our actual universe."
I believe thejAff agrees.
Last update : 19-04-2005 18:55
|
|
|
Users' Comments  |
|
Average user rating
 (0 vote)
|
|
Add your comment
|
jedi
By: jag (Guest) on 20-12-2007 00:42