This chapter has constantly invoked the notion of a globe, an oblate spheroid, to represent the planet. This is reasonable, given that not only do Newtonian physics and mechanics define it as such but it looks like one when viewed from space. There has long been – and still exists – a pseudoscience called zetetics which maintains that the Earth is in fact flat. Its adherents are popularly known as ‘Flat-Earthers’, a term of disparagement which connotes either stupidity or else wishful, head-in-the-sand archaism. Nor is this scorn unreasonable, given the crackpot tone in which their case is usually advanced.
When zetetics most earnestly offers its evidence, the classical procedure is for it to cite a list of mathematical and other ‘conundrums’ which might be taken as casting doubt on Copernican theory. It first proposes a model of the Earth which is a vast disc, an irregular plane of unspecified thickness and circumference at the centre of the universe, above whose surface the sun and stars circle on concentric paths. Its circumference is indeterminable because the edge of the known Earth is surrounded by a barrier of ice (which others might call the Arctic and Antarctic) beyond which ‘the natural world is lost to human perception. How far the ice extends; how it terminates; and what exists beyond it, are questions to which no present human experience can reply.’* The words are those of ‘Parallax’, the second edition of whose Zetetic Astronomy was published in London in 1873. There is reason for thinking he might also be the S. B. Rowbotham who published a book of the same title in 1849. This earlier date has some significance because it falls in a period of great interest and debate about the age of the Earth (see Marginalia to Chapter 5) and it is not at all surprising to find that ‘Parallax’ is a firm believer in 4004 BC as the date of Creation.
He begins by describing several experiments with flags, poles and ships to prove that the surface of water – and therefore also the sea – is not convex, and in due course reaches his cannon test. His argument is that if Earth were a rotating sphere a cannonball fired vertically into the air could not possibly fall back on top of the cannon. There is an engaging, schoolboy quality to this idea, like that of a child who imagines himself falling in a broken lift but able at the last moment to save himself (unlike everyone else in the lift) by craftily giving a little jump just before it crashes at the bottom of the shaft. At any rate, the conundrum of the cannonball exercised the minds of some quite elderly schoolboys during the Crimean War, and on 20 December 1857 the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, wrote to his Secretary for War, Lord Panmure, to clear up a few niggling points about British gunnery. He was assuming a cannonball fired in the air would not follow exactly the rotation of the Earth’s surface but would to some extent be left behind. That being so, he wondered if the Secretary for War realised that the tactics of modern warfare ought perhaps to be altered to take into account the obvious fact that the range of guns must vary according to the direction they were pointed in. Clearly, if they were fired eastwards in the direction of the globe’s rotation the balls would ‘fly less far upon the Earth’s surface than a ball fired due west’.*
‘Parallax’ re-examined the accounts of the voyages of oceanographers and explorers like Maury and Sir John Ross to show where their navigation had been at fault. It was hardly surprising that a man like Ross, even though of the highest personal integrity, had been deluded into thinking he had spent four years completing a circumnavigation of the globe when all he had done was sail 69,000 miles around the inside of the Great Ice Barrier. There was an urgent need to revise the whole science of navigation, particularly knowledge of the tides, sunrise and sunset, the seasons and the laws of perspective. Some of the writer’s own conclusions about the heavenly bodies were indeed radical. The sun is ‘considerably less than 700 statute miles above the earth,’ and ‘all the visible luminaries in the firmament are contained within a vertical distance of 1,000 statute miles’. Moreover, the Moon is transparent. ‘We are often able to see through the dark side of the moon’s body the light on the other side.’
This is most inventive, and ‘Parallax’ had many disciples from that day on, some of whom cribbed his examples. In 1940 a certain E. L. Venter of Bloemfontein published 100 Proofs that Earth Is Not a ‘Globe’ and also considered the cannon test, concluding ‘the ball always falls back on the cannon’. (Had he conducted his own experiments, one wonders, wearing a tin hat on a private range out in the veldt?) ‘That test proves that the earth is stationary. It is our proof no. 45 that the earth is not a globe.’ To this he adds the evidence of the ‘shadow’. ‘In the tropics a six foot man has no shadow at noon and for 16 miles on each side of him men have no shadow at noon, but men farther away begin to have shadows. This test of the vertical rays of the sun indicates that the diameter of the sun is only 32 miles …’
This sort of thing is not like the position of men like Dr Udintsev, the lone sceptic who doubts tectonic theory. But the point at which a serious scientist becomes a ‘nut’ is not without interest. The original zetetics were followers of Pyrrho, the founder of the sceptic philosophy, and their name derives from the Greek verb ‘to seek’. They thought of themselves as searchers and enquirers, not believers. The example of ‘Parallax’ and others like him shows how swiftly a text or collection of assertions turns into a doctrine which itself becomes a comfortable hive for every bee in every bonnet. Yet there ought to be an aspect of zetetics which confines itself to an absolute scepticism both playful and imaginative. There was an admirable movement which resolutely refused to believe in the US moon landing of 1969, maintaining that the entire thing had been a brilliant hoax designed to cow and discomfit the USSR as well as to ensure Congressional votes for the further unlimited funding of NASA. The idea was that the astronauts had never left the launch pad, that the extravaganza had been created in the studio using simulation techniques and special effects and fed into millions of TV sets around the world where it was received by a credulous audience. The merit of this argument, apart from being funny, was that the average viewer could not refute it. It made the point that a TV audience will believe anything they see provided it is served up with the right trappings and couched in the approved ‘History in the Making’ rhetoric.
It is not only from an anarchic streak that one would nearly prefer this version of events, but mainly because scepticism constantly frees thought yet can coexist with knowledge. Only at irritable moments aboard Farnella would I have been tempted to argue that GLORIA was an expensive hoax and the seabed at an infinite depth. Even the denial of a true idea creates a space which vibrates with possibility.
This place has no name. … Nor does the lost swimmer even have a place, buoyed up as he is in an illimitable steep of fluid and, for all he knows, borne along by a current. In all directions is void, whether air or water, though busy with sunlight and spangles and small events. The sea itself is calm. He wishes there were a higher swell so he could more easily keep up the hope that his boat, even though not many yards away, remains hidden by conspiracies of wavelets. He knows exactly what it would be like to be in an aeroplane flying above where he is now. He knows the burnished pane of ocean with its frozen wrinkles crossed by the aircraft’s shadow. He knows, too, how words like ‘millpond’ only ever come into the mind when gazing disembodiedly out of a window at 20,000 feet. This leaves the swimmer with an echo from which to build a name, ‘Despond’, for this locus in which he is adrift before he abandons it as hackneyed and unhelpful.
At last he works out that this place can have no name other than his own. Nothing if not isolate, he is himself an island. By mischance or gross carelessness he has become marooned on himself. This perception has a point in its favour. It is an island with room for only one castaway. In the almost impossible event of anybody else reaching its shores they would at least be coming as rescuers.