MARTIN GARDNER Notes of a Fringe-Watcher

Occam's Razor and the Nutshell Earth

1 could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.

Shakespeare, Hamlet 11:2

HERE IS an old joke about a drunk Twho, late one night, found himself leaning against a circular pillar. He walked around it several times, patting it, then sank to the ground. "S'no use," he groaned. "I'm all walled in." Incredible as it may seem, there was once a flourishing religious cult in Florida called Koreshanity, whose guru taught that the earth is hollow and we live on the inside. Almost as hard to believe is Cyrus Reed Teed, "Koresh" that this crazy theory still has defenders. But before explaining how the theory Calling himself "Koresh" (the Hebrew raises deep questions concerning the role word for Cyrus), Teed was convinced that of simplicity in science, and drawing a God had called him to be the founder of parallel with parapsychology, a few words a new faith, that the scientific establish­ about the Florida colony. ment was persecuting him just as they The founder, Cyrus Reed Teed, began had persecuted Galileo, and that anyone his career as a Baptist fundamentalist and who doubted the earth's concavity was an eclectic doctor. (Eclecticism was a in the grip of the Antichrist. In the late fringe medical school of the late nine­ 1890s he began moving his colony of teenth century that stressed herbal reme­ believers from Chicago to a spot south dies.) In 1869 Teed experienced what he of Fort Myers, on Florida's Estero River, called his Great Illumination. An angel where he established the town of Estero. revealed to him that the earth is a hollow The cult's magazine, the Flaming Sword, shell and that we live on its inner surface. did not expire until 1949, after an aston­ The sun, moon, and stars are all tiny ishing life of some 60 years. According objects moving about inside the sphere, to an article in Southern Living (May obeying complicated laws that Teed strug­ 1984), eight of the cult's thirty buildings gled to explain in his 1870 book The still stand and others are being restored. Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth a You can take a guided tour through them Concave Sphere. at the Koreshan State Historic Site, off

Summer 1988 355 Drawing of Teed's concave-earth cosmogony. (Courtesy Donald E. Simanek.)

U.S. 41, in Estero. mos: Mapping Outer Space Into a Hol­ Old pseudosciences seldom die com­ low Earth" was published in Speculations pletely. In Hitler's Germany an aviator in Science and Technology (vol. 6, 1983, named Peter Bender became the leader pp. 81-89), an Australian journal devoted of the Hohlwelttheorie (hollow-earth doc­ to unorthodox science. The noted philos­ trine), which championed an inside-out opher Paul Feyerabend is on its editorial cosmos. After his death the cult contin­ board. ued under the leadership of Karl Neu- Although Abdelkader acknowledges pert, whose Geokosmos (Zurich and his indebtedness to Braun, he gives to Leipzig, 1942) was the most widely read the concave-earth model a mathematical of his books. Other German books de­ precision lacking in all earlier accounts. fending Hohlwelttheorie were published, Imagine the earth's surface to be a perfect and similar monographs popped up in sphere. Using simple equations, Abdelkad­ Argentina. er performs on space what geometers call About ten years ago, a firm in Nevada an "inversion" with respect to the sphere. City, California, was selling a 1972 Eng­ All points outside the sphere are ex­ lish translation of a 1949 German book changed with all points inside. The by Fritz Braun titled Space and the Uni­ sphere's center maps to infinity, and in­ verse According to the Holy Scriptures. finity maps to the center. Inversion theory The book went through several revisions is often used by geometers for proving in Germany, where the English transla­ difficult theorems, and it has been extreme­ tion was also published. I was unable to ly useful in physics. obtain any information about the Nevada After inverting the cosmos, Abdel­ City group. Braun's most unusual addi­ kader then applies the same inversion to tions to the inside-out model are his all the laws of physics. The result is a putting God's throne in the center of the consistent physics that cannot be falsified shrunken universe, within a metal sphere, by any conceivable observation or experi­ and locating hell in the boundless region ment! Of course the equations for the outside the earth. This conforms (Braun laws become horribly complex. Light rays argues) to the Bible's picture of heaven follow circular arcs, the velocity of light as up, hell as down. goes to zero as it approaches the center The inside-out model recently found of inversion, and all sorts of other bizarre its most sophisticated defender in Mos- modifications of laws are required. To tafa A. Abdelkader, of Alexandria, an observer in this inverted universe every­ Egypt. Two of his papers were abstracted thing looks and measures exactly the in the Notices of the American Mathe­ same as in the Copernican model, even matical Society (October 1981 and Feb­ though the heavenly bodies become mi­ ruary 1982), and his article "A Geocos- nuscule. Day and night, eclipses, and the

356 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 12 orbits of the sun, moon, and planets— everything—can be explained by suitably inverted laws. Instead of the earth rota­ ting, the shrunken celestial bodies revolve the opposite way around the earth's "axis." Because light follows curved paths, the sun seems to set as usual below the "horizon" as it travels a conical helix, six months in one direction and six months in the other. The Foucault pen­ dulum, Coriolis effects, and other inertial "proofs" of the earth's rotation are all accounted for by the drastically modified laws. Could you confirm the theory by taking off in a spaceship to see if you would quickly reach the other side by following a diameter of the sphere? No, Karl Neupert, another promoter of because the closer you got to the center hollow-earth doctrine. of inversion the smaller your ship would become and the slower it would move. Nowhere does Abdelkader invoke the You would soon find yourself traveling Koran or his religious faith, though I through what would appear to be vast suspect that Muslim fundamentalism galaxies. If the universe before inversion lurks in the background in the same way was open and infinite, you would never that Christian fundamentalism underlies reach the center. It would be a singularity flat-earth theories and the cosmological at which your size and speed would be models of Teed and the German con- zero, and time would stop completely. cave-earthers. Teed liked to quote Isaiah Of course you could avoid the singularity 40:12, "[God] hath measured the waters and get to the other side, but the trip in the hollow of his hand." Abdelkader would take as long as traveling to the also thinks that cosmic rays are best outer edge of an expanding Copernican explained by his cosmology and that a universe and back again. The fastest way definitive test of his model could be made to get to the other side would be to fly by drilling a hole straight down through around the inner surface of the hollow the earth. If his model is correct, would earth. it not penetrate the earth's shell and open Abdelkader says his main reason for a hole to outer space? believing in his inverted model is the relief It would not. A true inversion of in­ it brings from the anxiety of thinking the finite space would produce an infinitely universe is so immense that the earth thick shell of solid rock all the way to fades into insignificance. Braun earlier eternity. As the drill went "down," it expressed the same emotion by writing would get larger and longer, and move that once you accept his model "the fear­ more rapidly, until it passed through the ful distances of billions of light years, "point at infinity," which corresponds to the infinite emptiness and senselessness" the earth's center before inversion. After of the Copernican model disappears. A that, the drill would start boring into the Freudian would say that the inside-out earth on the opposite side. The drill universe expresses an unconscious urge would emerge from the earth at a point to return to the warmth and security of antipodal to where it began drilling. the womb. The matter is controversial, but most

Summer 1988 357 mathematicians believe that an inside-out an application of Occam's Razor—the universe, with properly adjusted physical law of parsimony—makes the Copernican laws, is empirically irrefutable. Why, model enormously simpler. then, does science reject it? The answer Abdelkader's geocosmos poses an ex­ is that the price one has to pay in com­ treme example of a choice between two plicating physical laws is too high. A conventions, one simple and the other similar situation arises in relativity theory. insanely complicated. But on all levels of There is nothing "wrong" in supposing science Occam's Razor is a powerful tool. the earth fixed, as Ptolemy believed it I will cite only one instance from thou­ was, with the cosmos whirling around it. sands in the literature of psychic research. The question of which frame of reference When parapsychologist Charles Honor- is "right," a fixed earth or a fixed ton saw his friend Felicia Parise seem­ universe, is as meaningless as asking ingly use psychokinesis to move a plastic whether you stand on the earth or the pill bottle across a kitchen counter, the earth stands on your feet. Only relative film of this great event showed her hands motions are "real," but the complexity creeping slowly forward on each side of of description required when the earth is the bottle. The simplest explanation is taken as the preferred fixed frame is too that an "invisible" thread, stretched hori­ great a price to pay. zontally above the table from one hand The opposite is the case with respect to the other, propelled the bottle. The to choosing between Euclidian space and bottle even moved in little jumps, just as the non-Euclidian spacetime of general it would if friction resisted the pressure relativity. It is possible to preserve Eu­ of an extremely fine, slightly elastic nylon clidian space and modify the laws of rela­ thread. This conjecture gains support tivity accordingly—indeed, just such a from the facts that Honorton did not proposal was advanced by Alfred North know that invisible thread could be used Whitehead—but here simplicity is on the in this manner to move light objects away side of non-Euclidian space. In the space- from a person, that he did not examine time of relativity, light continues to move Felicia's hands before the experiment, and in straight lines, rigid objects do not alter that Felicia has never repeated the their shapes, and gravity becomes iden­ miracle. tical with inertia. It is only when we talk Why do some parapsychologists, after in a Euclidian language that gravity bends simple tricks like this have been explained light, objects contract at fast relative to them by magicians, refuse to thank speeds, and gravity and inertia appear as the explainers or to alter their beliefs distinct forces. about the genuineness of the phenomena? Conventionalism is the term used for Occam's Razor suggests the following points of view that emphasize the extent hypothesis: They lack the courage to to which mathematicians and scientists admit that, like the drunk, they had adopt basic axioms not because they are patted a pillar instead of a surrounding "true" but because they are the most wall. • convenient. Rudolf Carnap called it the "principle of tolerance," which he once Martin Gardner's latest book is The New expressed by saying, "Logic has no Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, just morals." One is free to adopt any set of released by Prometheus Books. It con­ axioms provided the system that follows tains pieces published in his SKEPTICAL is consistent and useful. One primary INQUIRER columns and in the New York criterion of usefulness is simplicity. The Times, the New York Review of Books, inside-out model of the universe is reject­ Discover, and other magazines, with ed not because it is "untrue" but because added forewords and afterwords.

358 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 12