One Hundred Proofs That the Earth Is Not a GlobeCarpenter, William
Science
One Hundred Proofs That the Earth Is Not a Globe
Carpenter, William
Earth (Planet) -- Miscellanea
98. Mr. Hind speaks of the astronomer watching a star as it is "carried
across the telescope by the diurnal revolution of the Earth." Now,
this is nothing but downright absurdity. No motion of the Earth could
possibly carry a star across a telescope or anything else. If the
star is carried across anything at all, it is the star that moves,
not the thing across which it is carried! Besides, the idea that the
Earth, if it were a globe, could possibly move in an orbit of nearly
600,000,000 of miles with such exactitude that the cross-hairs in
a telescope fixed on its surface would appear to glide gently over
a star "millions of millions" of miles away is simply monstrous;
whereas, with a FIXED telescope, it matters not the distance of the
stars, though we suppose them to be as far off as the astronomer
supposes them to be; for, as Mr. Proctor himself says, "the further
away they are, the less they will seem to shift." Why, in the name of
common sense, should observers have to fix their telescopes on solid
stone bases so that they should not move a hair's-breadth, if the
Earth on which they fix them move at the rate of nineteen miles in a
second? Indeed, to believe that Mr. Proctor's mass of "six thousand
million million million tons" is "rolling, surging, flying, darting
on through space for ever" with a velocity compared with which a shot
from a cannon is a "very slow coach," with such unerring accuracy
that a telescope fixed on granite pillars in an observatory will not
enable a lynx-eyed astronomer to detect a variation in its onward
motion of the thousandth part of a hair's-breadth is to conceive a
miracle compared with which all the miracles on record put together
would sink into utter insignificance. Captain R. J. Morrison, the late
compiler of "Zadkeil's Almanac," says: "We declare that this 'motion'
is all mere 'bosh'; and that the arguments which uphold it are,
when examined with an eye that seeks for TRUTH only, mere nonsense,
and childish absurdity." Since, then, these absurd theories are of
no use to men in their senses, and since there is no necessity for
anything of the kind in Zetetic philosophy, it is a "strong presumptive
proof"--as Mr. Hind would say--that the Zetetic philosophy is true,
and, therefore, a proof that Earth is not a globe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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