FLAT IS THE NEW ROUND:

Do they really think the earth is flat? (Brendan O'Neill, 8/04/08, BBC Magazine)

But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration - where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars - no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?

Wrong.

Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the "conspiracy" that the Earth is round.

"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.

"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."

Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago".

"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. "We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses."

Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it stretches horizontally forever".

"And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds.

James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a discussion website theflatearthsociety.org, has a slightly different take. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc," he states. "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter."

Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all just an elaborate joke".

So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.

'Brane-Storm' Challenges Part of Big Bang Theory (Robert Roy Britt, 18 April 2001, Space.com)

The inflationary model of the universe, developed in the 1980's by Alan Guth (MIT), Andre Linde (Stanford), Andreas Albrecht (UC Davis) and Steinhardt, was designed to resolve these very same problems, relying on a period of exponential hyper-expansion, or inflation.

Conceptually, the ekpyrotic model is very different. There is no inflation or rapid change happening at all. The approach to collision takes places very slowly over an exceedingly long period of time. It is quite fascinating that rapid change and very slow change can produce nearly the same effects. The difference results in one distinctive observational prediction, though: Inflationary cosmology predicts a spectrum of gravitational waves that may be detectable in the cosmic microwave background. The ekpyrotic model predicts no gravitational wave effects should be observable in the cosmic microwave background.

In the ekpyrotic model, when the two three-dimensional worlds collide and "stick," the kinetic energy in the collision is converted to the quarks, electrons, photons, etc. that are confined to move along three dimensions. The resulting temperature is finite, so the hot Big Bang phase begins without a singularity. The universe is homogeneous because the collision and initiation of the Big Bang phase occurs nearly simultaneously everywhere.

The energetically preferred geometry for the two worlds is flat, so their collision produces a flat Big Bang universe.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2008 9:19 AM