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However, the hypothesis of a Hollow Earth has long been contradicted by overwhelming evidence as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation, and the scientific community now dismisses the notion as Pseudoscience . HOLLOW EARTH CLAIMS Conventional hollow Earths Early history In ancient times, the idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became intertwined with the concept of "places" such as the Greek Hades , the Nordic Svartalfheim , the Jewish Sheol , and the Christian Hell . 's theory.]] 's purported hollow-Earth thought-experiment, featuring openings at the poles, with an internal star.]] Edmund Halley in 1692 (''Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London'') put forth the idea of Earth consisting of a hollow shell about 500 miles (800 km) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core, about the diameters of the planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury. Atmospheres separate these shells, and each shell has its own magnetic poles. The spheres rotate at different speeds. Halley proposed this scheme in order to explain anomalous compass readings. He envisaged the Atmosphere inside as Luminous (and possibly inhabited) and speculated that escaping gas caused the Aurora Borealis . Some have claimed involving a patently solid Earth. De Camp and Ley also claim that Sir John Leslie expanded on Euler's idea, suggesting two central suns named Pluto and Proserpine (this was unrelated to the dwarf planet Pluto , which was discovered and named some time later). Leslie did propose a hollow Earth in his 1829 ''Elements of Natural Philosophy'' (pp. 449-453), but does not mention interior suns. 19th century In 1818, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about 800 miles (1,300 km) thick, with openings about 1400 miles (2,300 km) across at both Pole s with 4 inner shells each open at the poles. Symmes became the most famous of the early Hollow Earth proponents. He actually proposed making an expedition to the North Pole hole, thanks to efforts of one of his followers, James McBride , but the new President of the United States, Andrew Jackson (in office 1829 - 1837), halted the attempt. Symmes died in 1829. However, another follower, Jeremiah Reynolds , also delivered lectures on the "Hollow Earth" and also argued for an expedition. Eventually he would drop talk about a hollow Earth after the death of Symmes. Reynolds went on an expedition to Antarctica himself but missed joining the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838 - 1842, even though that venture was a result of his agitation. He did not participate because he had offended too many in his call for such a trip. Symmes himself never wrote a book of his ideas but others did. McBride wrote ''Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres'' in 1826. It appears that Reynolds has an article that appeared as a separate booklet in 1827: ''Remarks of Symmes' Theory Which Appeared in the American Quarterly Review''. In 1868, a professor W.F. Lyons published ''The Hollow Globe'' which put forth a Symmes-like Hollow Earth theory, but didn't mention Symmes. Symmes's son Americus then published ''The Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres'' to set the record straight. Recent history An early twentieth-century proponent of a hollow Earth, William Reed, wrote '' Phantom Of The Poles '' in 1906. He propounded the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or inner suns. Marshall Gardner wrote ''A Journey to the Earth's Interior'' in 1913 and an expanded edition in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the hollow Earth. He even built a working model of the hollow Earth and patented it (#1096102). Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did take Symmes to task for his ideas. In the same time Vladimir Obruchev wrote a fiction novel ''Plutonia'', where the hollow Earth's interior possessed one inner (central) sun and inhabited by prehistoric species. The interior was connected with the surface by a hole in Arctic . Other writers have proposed that " Ascended Master s" of esoteric wisdom inhabit subterranean caverns or a hollow Earth. Antarctica , the North Pole, Tibet , Peru , and Mount Shasta in California , USA , have all had their advocates as the locations of entrances to a subterranean realm referred to as Agarttha , with some even advancing the theory that UFO s have their homeland in these places. A book allegedly by a Dr Raymond Bernard which appeared in 1969, ''The Hollow Earth'', exemplifies this idea. The book rehashes Reed and Gardner's ideas and ignores Symmes. Bernard also adds his own ideas: UFOs come from the interior, the Ring Nebula proves the existence of hollow worlds, etc. An article by Martin Gardner revealed that Walter Siegmeister used the pseudonym `Bernard', but only with Walter Kafton-Minkel's ''Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the Earth'' in 1989 did the full story of Bernard/Siegmeister emerge. The pages of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazine '' Amazing Stories '' promoted one such idea from 1945 to 1949 as "the Shaver Mystery". The magazine's editor, Ray Palmer , ran a series of stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver supposedly claimed as factual, though presented in the context of fiction. Shaver claimed that a superior pre-historic race had built a honeycomb of caves in the Earth, and that their degenerate descendants, known as "Dero", live there still, using the fantastic machines abandoned by the ancient races to torment those of us living on the surface. As one characteristic of this torment, Shaver described "voices" that purportedly came from no explainable source. Thousands of readers wrote to affirm that they, too, had heard the fiendish voices from inside the Earth. Fantastic stories (supposedly believed as factual within fringe circles) have also circulated that Adolf Hitler and some of his followers escaped to hollow lands within the Earth after World War II via an entrance in Antarctica. (See also Hitler's supposed adherence to concave hollow-Earth ideas, below.) In 2001 the , human Physiology , Impact Crater s and other Geology in light of such a hollow Earth. Kevin and Matthew Taylor's view of a hollow planet envisages a hollow globe with a small (depending on planet size) central sun ignited by radiation from the inner surface. They use this view both to explain Earth's Magnetic Field (replacing the Dynamo Theory ) and the origin and ignition of Star s. Some writers have proposed building Megastructure s that have some similarities to a hollow Earth -- see Dyson Sphere , Globus Cassus . Concave hollow Earths Instead of saying that humans live on the outside surface of a hollow planet, sometimes called a "convex" hollow-Earth theory, some have claimed that our universe itself lies in the interior of a hollow world, calling this a "concave" hollow-Earth theory. The surface of the Earth, according to such a view, might resemble the interior shell of a Dyson Sphere . Generally, scientists have taken neither type of speculation seriously. Cyrus Teed , an eccentric doctor from upstate New York, proposed such a concave hollow Earth in 1869, calling his scheme " Cellular Cosmogony ". Teed founded a Cult called the Koreshan Unity based on this notion, which he called Koreshanity . The main colony survives as a preserved Florida state historic site, at Estero , but all of Teed's followers have now died. Teed's followers claimed to have experimentally verified the concavity of the Earth's curvature, through surveys of the Florida coastline making use of "rectilineator" equipment. Several twentieth-century German writers, including Peter Bender, Johannes Lang, Karl Neupert, and Fritz Braun, published works advocating the hollow Earth theory, or ''Hohlweltlehre''. Stories have even been circulated, although apparently without historical documentation, that Hitler was influenced by concave hollow-Earth ideas and sent an expedition in an unsuccessful attempt to spy on the British fleet by aiming cameras up into the sky (Wagner, 1999). The Egyptian mathematician Mostafa Abdelkader authored several scholarly papers working out a detailed mapping of the concave Earth model. See M. Abdelkader, "A Geocosmos: Mapping Outer Space Into a Hollow Earth," 6 ''Speculations in Science & Technology'' 81-89 (1983). Abstracts of two of Abdelkader's papers also appeared in ''Notices of the American Mathematical Society,'' (Oct. 1981 and Feb. 1982). In one chapter of his book ''On the Wild Side'' (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this theory posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies. Martin Gardner notes that "most mathematicians believe that an inside-out universe, with properly adjusted physical laws, is empirically irrefutable". Gardner rejects the concave hollow Earth theory on the basis of Occam's Razor . In a trivial sense, one can always define a Coordinate transformation such that the interior of the Earth becomes "exterior" and the exterior becomes "interior". (For example, in spherical coordinates, let radius ''r'' go to ''R''&2/''r'' where ''R'' is the Earth's radius.) Such transformations would require corresponding changes to the forms of physical laws; the consensus suggests that such theories tend towards Sophistry . GRAVITY AND A HOLLOW EARTH Someone on the inside of a hollow Earth would not experience an outward pull and could not stand on the inner surface; rather, the theory of Gravity implies that a person on the inside would be nearly Weightless . This was first shown by Newton , whose Shell Theorem mathematically predicts a gravitational force of zero everywhere inside a spherically symmetric hollow shell of matter, regardless of the shell's thickness. A tiny gravitational force would arise from the fact that the Earth does not have a perfectly symmetrical spherical shape, and also from Tidal Force s due to masses such as the Moon which do not form part of the spherical shell. The Centrifugal Force from the Earth's rotation would also pull a person outwards, but even at the Equator this is only 1/300 of ordinary Earth gravity. Also, if the Earth were largely hollow but made of the same materials, it would have much less mass than what is actually observed (from, e.g., the strength of gravity at the outer surface). HOLLOW EARTHS IN FICTION Literature
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HOLLOW MOON An allied theory regarded The Moon as being hollow, with the interior having a breathable atmosphere - which allowed various SF writers to postulate Lunar life, including intelligent life, despite scientific observation that the Lunar surface is airless. This sub-genre seems to have died out following the actual Moon landing in 1969. REFERENCES SEE ALSO
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