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Re: Hollow Earth

Another example: (IMAO) Newton was a total nut theologically. I have, somewhere in the
darker reaches of our garage, a book that discusses various turn of the century theories
thought to be crackpot. Most of them are so confirmed. One not was tectonic plates. It's
easy for me to imagine such a theory as absurd as a round earth before Leonardo (lunar
eclipses have a curved terminator -- he also explained the not total darkness of lunar
phases to earth shine) or Magellan.

bc


Jim Green wrote:

At 06:44 24 04 2000 , Barlow wrote:
I must have missed the crutial part of this! Why are we in a struggle
with theories of a hollow earth? Is it supposed to make geomagnetism
easier to understand? What might it do for our theories if we
postulated a hollow earth? It seems to me that the mass comes out
pretty well if you assume that the earth is solid throughout with
something that has a density about the same as that of iron ore. Is
there any observational information that can be more easily explained
with a "hollow" earth? Unfortunately, geophysics is not my forte!
W. B. Newbolt

Barlow, it was _my_ question which began this thread, I did not mean to
try to explore the truth of the idea of a hollow Earth, but rather the
history of this question. I think that an appeal to seismic data ought to
satisfy most of us -- just as most of us are pretty well satisfied that the
Earth is not "flat" -- nevertheless there are many who do accept the
picture of a flat Earth -- just as there are many who at least entertain
the idea of a hollow Earth or at least that the picture is not out of the
question. I think that Haley, Euler, Byrd, etc have been given as
examples of proponents -- I don't think that many of us would dismiss them
as total nuts. They did believe that they have credible data -- and some
still accept that data.

I think that a competent scientist would at least incorporated these ideas
somewhere in the dark reaches of his/her mind -- rather than feel something
like "I don't believe it therefore it is total nonsense".

Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen