Samuel rowbotham zetetic astronomy license#
As far as I can see this is simply a license to employ circular reasoning ( e.g., the earth is flat, hence we can see distant lighthouses, hence the earth is flat). To make his system work he had to throw out a great deal of science, including the scientific method itself, using instead what he calls a ‘Zetetic’ method. If the Copernican theory so adequately explains planetary motions, why discard it, and what would he use in its place? What is the sun orbiting around once a day and how does it work like a spotlight, not a ‘point source’? If the moon is self-luminous, what creates its phases? If gravity appears to work here on earth, why doesn’t it apply to the celestial objects just a few hundred miles up? Rowbotham never adequately explains his alternative astronomy. He attacks the concept of a plurality of worlds because no other world than this one is mentioned in the Bible. He uses Ussherian Biblical chronology to mock the concept that stars could be millions of light years away. Heaven is not a state of mind, it is a real place, somewhere above us. Hell is exactly as advertised, directly below us. Zetetic cosmology is ‘faith-based’, based, that is, on a literal interpretation of selected Biblical quotes. Eclipses can be explained by some unknown object occulting the sun or moon. The moon is both self-illuminated and semi-transparent. The sun orbits the north pole once a day at a constant altitude. The Zetetic Sun, moon, planets and stars are all only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. I think that by the 19th century people would have noticed if Australia and Africa were thousands of miles further apart than expected, let alone if Africa was wider than it was long! The Zetetic map has a severly squashed South America and Africa, and Australia and New Zealand in the middle of the Pacific. Figure 54 inadvertantly illustrates this problem. The polar projection of the flat earth creates obvious discrepancies with known geography, particularly the farther south you go. What we call the North Pole is in the center of the earth.
The lands we know are surrounded by an infinite wilderness of ice and snow, beyond the Antarctic ocean, bordered by an immense circular ice-cliff. The continents float on an infinite ocean which somehow has a layer of fire underneath it. Rowbotham believed that the earth is flat. Rowbotham hints at the incident in this book. The judge ruled against Hampton, who started a long campaign of legal harassment of Wallace. An experiment which Hampden proposed didn’t resolve the issue, and the two ended up in court in 1876.
One of them, John Hampden, got involved in a bet with the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace about the flat earth. Rowbotham was an accomplished debater who reputedly steamrollered all opponents, and his followers, who included many well-educated people, were equally tenacious. The third edition of 1881 (which had inflated to 430 pages) was used as the basis of this etext. This book, in which he lays out his world system, went through three editions, starting with a 16 page pamphlet published in 1849 and a second edition of 221 pages published in 1865.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham, under the pseudonym ‘Parallax’, lectured for two decades up and down Britain promoting his unique flat earth theory. Once you get into his book one can easily understand the flat earth concept as well as his use of facts, reason, logic and direct observation led him to believe in the flat plane earth. Rowbotham deserves a huge amount of credit for this in depth research. This book is for those wishing to understand better what many, many ancient civilizations as well as many biblical quotes believed to be the shape and purpose of our Earth and stars. Various chapters concern motion of the heavenly bodies, sunrises, sunsets, the tidal movements, and distances of the Sun and Moon from Earth.~ I disagree with several of these comments by this book reviewer. Most of these are framed with illustrations and diagrams, that the reader understands Rowbotham's notions. Experiments and demonstrations are conducted in support of the Earth being flat, with the astronomical bodies situated above, rather than around it. In 1881 the author expanded and published this book, in part to meet public and scientific scrutiny. Rowbotham was already an inventor and author, and over time theories of Zetetic Astronomy - in which the Earth is flat - became popular. This book began as a pamphlet in the 1840s, explaining the theory with a few sketches alongside. This premium edition contains all of Rowbotham's original graphs, charts and drawings. Samuel Birley Rowbotham advances the Flat Earth theory, which holds that Earth is not in fact an oblate spheroid planet, but an enclosed plane above which the astronomical bodies are situated.
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