Up to this day, there are people who believe that the world is flat. In particular, members of the Flat Earth Society are the ones who believe in this theory. The movement was established and led by British inventor Samuel Rowbotham.

Origins of the flat Earth movement

According to his pamphlet, which later expanded into a book entitled Earth Not A Globe, the North Pole sits on the center of a flat disk and at the south of which is Antarctica. He regarded his flat disk hypothesis as "Zetetic Astronomy".

When his ideas gained public attention through debates like the one which included the renowned scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, it led to the filing of many fraud and libel lawsuits. But that did not stop his theories in its existence because even after Rowbotham died, his followers published a magazine entitled The Earth Not a Globe Review. It remained well until the early part of the 20^th century. However, the movement declined after World War I.

In the United States, the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church adopted this idea. It was founded by John Alexnder Dowie, a Scottish faith healer, in 1895 in Zion, Illinois. Dowie was replaced by Wilbur Glenn Voliva in 1905. Since then, the doctrine has been taught in schools within the community. Further, Voliva spread his views through radio, making him a pioneer of religious broadcasting. When he died in 1942, the church underwent a downfall but the doctrine remained until the 1950s.

The Flat Earth followers dismissed the Apollo Moon landing photographs and claimed that it was a hoax, saying that it was staged in Hollywood with Arthur C. Clark as its scriptwriter. This was even believed by those who were not connected with the movement.

Charles K. Johnson

In 1971, Charles K. Johnson became president of the Flat Earth Society. For the next three decades, the movement's population grew to about 3,000. Newsletters, maps and other promotional items were distributed. In one newsletter they claimed that scientists were witchdoctors and sorcerers. A new model for the world was released by the movement stating that the world is a disc and the North Pole is at its center with a wall of ice at the outer fringes. Johnson later died on March 19, 2001.

Physics of a flat Earth

For its physics, the Flat Earth Society claimed that the Earth has a diameter of about 40,000 kilometers with 126,000 kilometers as its circumference. It even stated that the sun and moon are both discs, and that the Earth is moving upward with a speed of 9.8 miles per second squared causing gravity to exist.

Regarding their notion about the phases of the moon, there are two theories which have been accepted as it is:

1) Shadow Object theory, in which a never-discovered and never-detected object passes along the moon causing its phases.

2) Reflection Theory, in which the light coming from the sun is reflected off by Earth to the moon, but since not the entire Earth receives such light, the moon does not get wholly illuminated.

However, the movement has no answer concerning the differences between the distances of the surfaces of a round Earth and a flat one. For instance, the obvious inconsistency in the flat Earth is shown in the distance between New Zealand and Chile.

With all its preachings and doctrines, the Flat Earth Society has been known in the popular culture. But in this day and age where a spherical Earth is a fact, it's more on satires and denunciations of the movement's dogma.

Image Source: Wikipedia