Although more than 200 flat Earth believers from all over the world crammed into Britain’s first Flat Earth Convention, those that flew failed to spot the curvature of the planet.
Scientists and mathematicians have shown the Earth to be round for more than 2,000 years, a stubborn minority of pseudoscientists still believe the planet is flat – and many of them met in Birmingham, UK, to discuss their madcap ideas.
They have discussed some bizarre theories about why people, planes and ships do not fall off the edge.
The latest is the Pac-Man theory.
The retro computer game automatically places a player’s icon on the opposite side of the board when falling off the edge.
The Pac-Man effect
The theory was propounded by musician Darren Nesbit.
He says he was convinced the Earth was flat by two easily observable facts.
“One is that, go look or stand outside – the world is clearly not moving.” he said.
“The second is no matter where you live on this supposed ball, you seem to live right on top of it.
“Someone should be living on the side of the ball, with a perfectly vertical landscape, and people should be living underneath it, walking upside down if the Earth is round.”
Nesbit argues he developed the Pac-Man theory to explain why a flat Earth has no wall or discernible edges.
“We know that continuous east-west travel is a reality,” he said.
Gravity does not exist
“One logical possibility for those who are truly free thinkers is that space-time wraps around, and we get a Pac-Man effect.”
Dave Marsh, another speaker, has an even more outlandish theory that rubbishes the work of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
“My research destroysBig Bang cosmology,” he said. “It supports the idea that gravity doesn’t exist and the only true force in nature is electromagnetism.”
Flat Earthers believe the planet is a one-sided disc and not a sphere.
The guardian of their beliefs is the Flat Earth Society, an organisation dedicated to proving the Earth is not round despite the evidence from space and of other planets, which some claim are projections or elaborate hoaxes.
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