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A "hollow Earth" theory posits that the planet Earth has a hollow interior and probably a habitable inner surface. Although at one time adventure literature made this idea popular, the notion now receives little support; direct observation refutes it; substantial geodetic evidence has long since controverted it and the scientific community dismisses it 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.

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 Leonhard Euler also proposed a hollow-Earth idea, getting rid of multiple shells and postulating an interior sun 600 miles (1000 km) across to provide light to advanced inner-Earth civilization. This claim may result from a mis-reading of a paper that simply involved a thought experiment.

Sir John Leslie expanded on this idea, suggesting two central suns, which he named Pluto and Proserpine.

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 poles 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 apparently went on an attempted expedition himself, but the outcome remains unclear. (Information on Reynolds remains sketchy and contradictory: we even lack an image of him. Some say he only had pecuniary interests, that his claimed 'expedition' consisted of an attempt to defraud and that he disappeared following it. Others say he did try to conduct his own expedition and failed, then missed out on joining the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838 - 1842, and later faded into obscurity).

Reynolds' agitation did result in an expedition: the Wilkes Expedition. Reynolds 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.

Later came Marshall Gardner who wrote A Journey to the Earth's Interior in 1913 and then 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.

Other writers have proposed that "ascended masters" 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 UFOs 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 totally 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 Australian father-and-son team Kevin and Matthew Taylor self-published the book The Land of No Horizon (direct link National Library of Australia ISBN 0646410571). Among other things it proposes an expanding and hollow Earth (as well as other planetary bodies) which eventually reached equilibrium. The book also looks at a range of topics including but not limited to evolution, human physiology, impact craters 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 stars.

Some writers have proposed building megastructures that have some similarities to a hollow Earth -- see Dyson sphere, Globus Cassus.

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to all bells is their hollow form, ...' http://www.msu.edu/~carillon/batmbook/chapter4.htm

'In terms of the planet, Dr McQueen compares the difference between the magnitude 9.0 quake and more common large quakes to "tapping a bell with a spoon and belting it with a hammer". http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/The-day-the-Earth-was-squeezed-and-the-pole-shifted/2005/02/04/1107476802749.html

'Seismic waves travelled through the planet for weeks as Earth rang like a bell from the shock of the Alaska earthquake, wrote Doug Christensen, associate director of the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute. ' http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1689.html

Mysteries of the Inner Earth

Part 1: The Solid Earth Hypothesis 1. The standard earth model 2. Deep drilling springs surprises 3. Mass, density, and seismic velocity (09/05) 4. Deep earthquakes 5. Geomagnetism References

Part 2: The Hollow Earth Hypothesis 1. Early theories 2. Modern theories 3. Hollow moons 4. Feasibility -- I (06/04) 5. Feasibility -- II (08/05) References

Part 3: Polar Puzzles 1. The open polar sea 2. The north pole controversy 3. Polar land coverup? 4. Flights of fancy 5. Auroras and the poles References

Part 4: Mythology, Paradise, and the Inner World 1. The Imperishable Sacred Land 2. Shambhala 3. A northern paradise 4. Inner kingdoms References .... http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/DP5/inner1.htm

Concave hollow Earths

Instead of saying that we 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 eclectic 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).

At least one contemporary proponent of a concave hollow Earth theory has developed adjustments to the laws of physics that take into account gravitation, optics, and so forth. 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". However, Gardner rejects the concave hollow Earth theory, not as disproven, but instead entirely on the basis of Occam's Razor.

In a trivial sense, of course, 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 R²/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 putative 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 forces 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.

Hollow Earths in fiction

Literature

  • An early science-fiction work called Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery by a "Captain Adam Seaborn" appeared in print in 1823. It obviously reflected the ideas of John Cleves Symmes, Jr, and some have claimed Symmes as the real author. One recent reprint of the work gives Symmes as the author. Others disagree. Some researchers say it deliberately satirized Symmes's ideas, and think they have identified the author as an early American author named Nathanial Ames who wrote other works, including one that might have served as the inspiration of Moby Dick (see Lang, Hans-Joachim and Benjamin Lease. "The Authorship of Symzonia: The Case for Nathanial Ames" New England Quarterly, June 1975, page 241-252.)

  • In the alternative fiction novel Circumpolar, the Earth is donut-shaped, and Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and various famous aviation pilots must fly through the middle of the planet in order to win an air race.

  • Willis Emerson wrote another science fiction novel worthy of mention: The Smoky God (1908). The novel claims to recount the true adventures of one Olaf Jansen who traveled into the interior, found an advanced civilization, and then left it. Some people regard The Smoky God as non-fiction.

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, more concerned with entertainment than plausibility, also wrote tales of adventure in the inner world of Pellucidar (including, at one point, a visit from his character Tarzan). Note that, although the inner surface of the Earth has an absolutely smaller area than the outer, Burroughs's Pellucidar has oceans on the outer surface corresponding to continents on the inner surface and vice-versa, so that Pellucidar actually has a greater land area than the "outer" continents combined. Primitive humans and an exciting mix of all those large and dangerous creatures which have unfortunately become extinct on the outer surface inhabit Pellucidar, and Burroughs did not hesitate to add such improvements as the Mahars, creatures vaguely resembling large intelligent pterodactyls with dangerous psychic powers. For light Pellucidar has a central miniature sun which never sets, so that its human inhabitants have never developed the notion of time.

  • Similarly, the natives of the high-gravity planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity believe they are living in a hollow world because of optical effects in their dense atmosphere.

  • The Russian geologist Vladimir Obruchev uses the concept of the hollow Earth in his popular scientific novel Plutonia to take the reader through various geological epochs.

  • The fantasy series The Death Gate Cycle, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, also features a concave hollow world, beginning in Elven Star, the second book in the series. This world, called 'Pryan the World of Fire', presents a classic hollow world, in which the constant light from its central sun has caused the plant life to grow to such size that all of the people on Pryan live atop the highest trees on a nearly rock-solid network of branches and leaves.

  • Rudy Rucker's novel The Hollow Earth appeared in 1990, and features Edgar Allan Poe and his ideas.

  • The novel Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth by Max McCoy (1997) expands on the legend of Hitler's supposed escape to the Earth's interior.

  • Umberto Eco's thriller Foucault´s Pendulum features dubious characters who dream of an absolute power stemming from telluric currents, which they believe to be possibly related to the hollow nature of the Earth, and supposedly known to the Templars.

Other cultural references

  • In the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Journey to the Center of Acme Acres", a series of earthquakes shake up the city, causing Plucky and Hamton to fall into a crater in the ground. They fall for hours before finally reaching the center, which is hollow. They are shaken back and forth as a result of the momentum from falling, before stopping and floating in mid-air at the dead center of the world.

  • The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game's Mystara campaign setting included a Hollow World expansion, which served as a nature preserve of sorts, where gods placed extinct creatures and civilizations.

  • The comics series Les Terres Creuses by Belgian comics writers Luc and François Schuiten features several hollow-Earth settings.

  • The comic book series BPRD by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, did a collection called "Hollow Earth", where the team journeys into great caverns inside the Earth inhabited by Hyperborian people and fantastic machines, some emblazoned with a swastica. At the center is the city of the creatures and their leader.

  • The Cybertron cartoon series features a character, Professor Lucy Suzuki, who believes in the Hollow Earth Theory.

  • The PC Role Playing game "Torin's Passage" features a depiction of a hollow Earth (though technicaly the fictional planet is called "Strata") similar to the one described by Edmund Halley, with the surface world (called "The Lands Above" in the game) being the largest, while the worlds within it (four, known collectively as "The Lands Below") become progressively smaller as the player, "Torin" descends into them from The Lands Above.

  • The film Marebito has also references and theme of hollow Earth and the netherworld or subterranean realms.

  • In the 1970s, comic-book artist Mike Grell produced the comic-book Warlord, about a pilot who finds himself in Skartaris, a sword-and-sorcery world reached through an opening at the North Pole. First believed to be the hollow interior of the Earth, Skartaris was later revealed to be a parallel dimension.

  • The Marvel Universe features several underground empires ruled by villains like the Mole Man or Tyranus. A race of mutant survivors from ancient Lemuria known as Deviants also live underground.

  • In The Ascension, the Hollow Earth exists as an alternate reality (or "horizon realm") that mages and especially the Sons of Ether faction can visit, but virtually all ways of accessing without magic have ceased to exist in the modern age because people no longer believe the Earth could be hollow.

See also

External links

Earth | Obsolete scientific theories | Pseudoscience | Subterranea | UFOs

Dutozemě | Theorie der hohlen Erde | Théories de la Terre creuse | 지구공동설 | 地球空洞説 | 地球空洞说

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Hollow Earth".

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