Flat Earth Quotes – 72 Reflections on the Concept

"Now, eighteen months after the first light, three months after the true day, but a very few days after the pure Sun of that most wonderful study began to shine, nothing restrains me; it is my pleasure to yield to the inspired frenzy, it is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgement that I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far, far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study Him."

Johannes Kepler

"If the Government or NASA had said to you that the Earth is stationary, imagine that. And then imagine we are trying to convince people that ‘no, no it’s not stationary, it’s moving forward at 32 times rifle bullet speed and spinning at 1,000 miles per hour.’ We would be laughed at! We would have so many people telling us ‘you are crazy, the Earth is not moving!’ We would be ridiculed for having no scientific backing for this convoluted moving Earth theory. And not only that but then people would say, ‘oh then how do you explain a fixed, calm atmosphere and the Sun’s observable movement, how do you explain that?’ Imagine saying to people, ‘no, no, the atmosphere is moving also but is somehow magically velcroed to the moving-Earth. The reason is not simply because the Earth is stationary.’ So what we are actually doing is what makes sense. We are saying that the moving-Earth theory is nonsense. The stationary-Earth theory makes sense and we are being ridiculed. You’ve got to picture it being the other way around to realize just how RIDICULOUS this situation is. This theory from the Government and NASA that the Earth is rotating and orbiting and leaning over and wobbling is absolute nonsense and yet people are clinging to it, tightly, like a teddy bear. They just can’t bring themselves to face the possibility that the Earth is stationary though ALL the evidence shows it: we feel no movement, the atmosphere hasn’t been blown away, we see the Sun move from East-to-West, everything can be explained by a motionless Earth without bringing in all these assumptions to cover up previous assumptions gone bad."

Allen Daves

"For centuries the case of Galileo Galilei has been the cornerstone of every major argument against the church and its supposedly unscientific dogmatism. The church seems to have condemned Galileo for his heresies, just because it couldn’t and wouldn’t handle the truth. Galileo was a hero of science wrongfully accused and now – at last – everyone knows that. But is that true? This paper tries to examine the case from the point of modern physics and the conclusions drawn are startling. It seems that contemporary church was too haste into condemning itself. The evidence provided by Galileo to support the heliocentric system do not even pass simple scrutiny, while modern physics has ruled for a long time now against both heliocentric and geocentric models as depictions of the “truth”. As Einstein eloquently said, the debate about which system is chosen is void of any meaning from a physics’ point of view. At the end, the selection of the center is more a matter of choice rather than a matter of ‘truth’ of any kind. And this choice is driven by specific philosophical axioms penetrating astronomy for hundreds of years now. From Galileo to Hubble, the Copernican principle has been slowly transformed to a dogma followed by all mainstream astronomers. It is time to challenge our dogmatic adherence to the anti-humanism idea that we are insignificant in the cosmos and start making true honest science again, as Copernicus once postulated."

Spyridon Kakos

"People give ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firma-ment, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth."

Martin Luther

"It may be boldly asked where can the man be found, possessing the extraordinary gifts of Newton, who could suffer himself to be deluded by such a hocus-pocus, if he had not in the first instance willfully deceived himself? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a condition to explain the conduct of Newton and of Newton’s school. To support his unnatural theory Newton heaps fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where he cannot convince. In whatever way or manner may have occurred this business, I must still say that I curse this modern theory of Cosmogony, and hope that perchance there may appear, in due time, some young scientist of genius, who will pick up courage enough to upset this universally disseminated delirium of lunatics."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down."

Sir Fred Hoyle

"Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense."

Sir Fred Hoyle

"we can take either the Earth or the Sun, or any other point for that matter, as the center of the solar system."

Fred Hoyle

""The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, “the Sun is at rest and the Earth moves,” or “the Sun moves and the Earth is at rest,” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.""

Albert Einstein

"You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track."

Albert Einstein

"No physical experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion."

Lincoln Barnett

"We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief. Those challenges are yours -- in many fields, not the least of which is space, because there lies human destiny"

Neil Alden Armstrong

"Geocentrism is a valid frame, but not the only one. I have two things to say that might surprise you: first, geocentrism is a valid frame of reference, and second, heliocentrism is not any more or less correct."

Philip Plait

"In Newton’s day, the Ptolemaic system and the Keplerian version of the Copernican system were taught side by side in the universities of the world. But the pendulum of belief had swung irreversibly to the Copernican side. In the minds of most scientists, the heliocentric universe had become fact…Yet there remained a crucial missing element in what was otherwise a complete and compelling picture of the universe: Not one shred of indisputable observational proof existed that the Earth moved through space.Here then was the holy grail of many an astronomer. To prove that the Earth in fact revolved in a wide orbit around the Sun, the parallax of just one star – any star – had to be detected. The hunt for stellar parallax was on."

Alan Hirshfeld

"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, “the Sun is at rest and the Earth moves,” or “the Sun moves and the Earth is at rest,” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS."

Albert Einstein

"“But when you look at CMB map (Cosmic Microwave Background), you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.”"

Lawrence Krauss

"Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, analogous, in a sense, to the ancient conception of a central earth. The hypothesis cannot be disproved but it is unwelcome and would be accepted only as a last resort in order to save the phenomena. [...] But the unwelcome supposition of a favoured location must be avoided at all costs."

Edwin Powell Hubble

"Now at first sight, all this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look in might seem to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is, however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other galaxy too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann’s second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or against, this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty"

Stephen William Hawking