Flat Earth Theory

About

Flat Earth Theory is a hypothesis that states that there is no true evidence that the earth is round. While the hypothesis is often dismissed as a weak, easily disproved theory, several different organizations online boast subscribers to the hypothesis, who enjoy discussing whether or not the earth is flat.

Origin

People have believed that the Earth is flat since the beginning of humanity, but the modern Flat Earth hypothesis stemmed from an experiment called the Bedford Level Experiment, conducted in the mid-1800s by a man named Samuel Rowbotham.^[1] Rowbowtham, who wrote a book named Earth Not a Globe, started the modern movement by debating scientists publicly and accumulating followers. In the experiment, Rowbowtham attempted to measure the curvature of the earth by observing the curvatures at a local river. He took his results as disproving the theory of a round earth, but future scientists have said that the results he obtained could be accounted for by the parallax effect.^[2]

A drawing from Rowbowtham’s experiment

In 1956, Samuel Shenton created a more modern version of the Flat Earth Society, to collect a variety of followers of Rowbowtham’s experiments. When the first images of the earth taken from space were released, Shenton claimed that they were false. In the 1970s and 1980s, they released a newsletter called the Flat Earth News, which often debated NASA and other space agencies.

Spread

In 2004, the society was resurrected by a man named Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel), who created the Flat Earth Society forum, which as of February 2016 has over 8,200 members and 1.4 million posts.^[3] In addition, the forum runs a Facebook page with over 14,000 likes,^[4]Twitter,^[5]Instagram,^[6] and Tumblr profiles with several thousand followers each, and a Flickr profile^[7] where they advertise a variety of different posters with proofs for why the world is flat. In addition, a variety of independent researchers have attempted to prove that the earth is flat, documenting their work in YouTube videos.^[8]

B.o.B. vs. Neil DeGrasse Tyson

On January 25th, 2016 Atlanta rapper B.o.B., who has self-identified as a member of the Flat Earth Society, tweeted a photograph of himself against a skyline, then tweeted a screenshot from Flat Earth Movement literature that proclaimed that Polaris (the North Star) can be seen 20° south of the Equator. Neil DeGrasse Tyson answered the rapper’s question, writing “Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you’ve never looked up.”