The hollow Earth in pseudoscience and science

Cyrus Reed Teed (Koresh)

1870 saw the first appearance of a curious variant of the hollow Earth theory outside the literary field. The American Cyrus Read Teed proclaimed his belief that the Earth is hollow, but (here is the difference with previous theories) we live inside. Although the sea surface has been known for over two thousand years to be convex, and in spite of the arguments that led the Greek philosophers to assign the Earth a spherical shape, with ourselves on its outer surface, Teed was convinced that the Earth is really concave. The apparently infinite outer space would be a hollow bubble inside a universe made of rock. Teed changed his name to Koresh and founded a religion (Koreshanity) which reached several thousand followers, although they were scattered after his death in 1908.

Soon after, a German aviator named Bender, a prisoner in France during the First World War, read Teed publications and believed them. Bender developed these theories and asserted that the universe is an infinite mass of rock surrounding a bubble 13,000 kilometers in diameter, in whose inner surface we live. The atmosphere, 60 kilometers thick, thins up to the central vacuum, where three bodies move: the sun, the moon and the ghost universe, a ball of gas with shining points of light: the stars. When the ghost universe passes before the sun, it causes the alternation of day and night in the various regions of the inner surface of the Earth.

Dostoyevsky and the function of one variable

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In his novel The devils (or The possessed, for there are two versions of the title), published in 1872, Dostoyevsky appears as a political prophet who displays a surprising knowledge of Communism and communists. In this book, 45 years before the fact, he predicted correctly that Russia would be the first country where Communism would win, an idea disregarded by Marx and Engels due to the lack of an industrial proletariat in that country. Let us listen to one of the characters in the novel:

We know that a mysterious finger is pointing to our delightful country as the land most fitted to accomplish the great task.

The communists in the book, the possessed, or the devils, have the same aims as their counterparts who triumphed in the Soviet Union, such as the elimination of religion. To reach their objectives, they propose two different procedures. Let us look at the words that Dostoyevsky puts in their mouths: