Cellular cosmogony

Cellular cosmogony is a particularly nutty view of the Universe, invented by a cult leader named Koresh Teed (a.k.a. Cyrus Reed Teed) (1839–1908) and described by him in a book with the same title.[1] It basically states that we are living not on the outer surface of a globe, but on the inner surface of a spherical hollow.

The fault in our stars
Pseudoastronomy
Adding epicycles
Epicyclists
v - t - e

Koresh and his cult

Cyrus Reed Teed was a practitioner of eclectic medicine from upstate New York. After accidentally electrocuting himself and having a near-death experience, he changed his name to its Hebrew form, Koresh, proclaimed himself a messiah and started gathering followers. In 1894, Teed and his followers, known as the Koreshan Unity, moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Estero, Florida, where they established a religious commune, and tried to build a "New Jerusalem" on Earth. After Teed's death in 1908, membership began to dwindle, possibly because of the fact that they believed in "sex inside of marriage only, for procreation only". The last Koreshan, Hedwig Michel, gave most of the land to the state of Florida and later died in 1981. Nowadays, the site is now known as the Koreshan State Park: not only is Florida chock-a-block full of live crackpots, they also have state parks dedicated to dead ones.[2]

Beliefs

Koreshanity has several nutty beliefs, including reincarnation, although "cellular cosmogony" is their keystone. According to Cellular Cosmogony, the surface of the Earth is actually the inner surface of a sphere ("cell"). The rest of the universe is also contained within. The actual Sun is invisible; our Sun, the Moon, and the stars are just reflections off some mercury discs in the centre of the Universe.

Teed was very pseudoscientific in other regards; he was an alchemist and enshrined this in his cult. Teed was a fan of radium — according to him, radium's mysteries defeated the science of the day.[3] He was right that it would be in the basis of a great discovery, but he was dead wrong when trying to predict what that discovery was. Teed didn't like Charles Darwin and used him as an example of "modern scientific conclusions" to mock the scientific method[4] (or rather his straw man of it).[note 1]

Refuting

If it absolutely needs to be said, Cellular Cosmogony is completely wrong. Although, with a lot of broken razors and the right metric (one that turns space inside out and enlarges and reduces distances accordingly), this model can actually sort-of work as a mathematical model matching astronomical observations, but there are many problems. Seismic analyses show Earth is a non-hollow sphere[note 2] with a crust, mantle, and core. This is reflected in things like where waves from earthquakes are recorded, in a model consistent with a solid (not hollow) Earth but not with a hollow Earth we're inside.

Woo never dies?

One would think that Koresh's crackpottery would have died with his last follower, massaraksh, but on the Internet no woo is old enough or implausible enough to be rejected. A number of forum threads and YouTube videos indicate that there are people who still (or again) believe in an inside-out world.

And all those pictures from the Mars rovers are fake, because…

“”TPTB want us to believe that we are unimportant and unsignificant[sic] in comparisson[sic] to the infinite expanding universe. they want us to feel lonely and separated. … this theory is a deep psychological and spiritual idea, which gives us an understanding of who we are and why we´re here…
—Anonymous Coward 996709, Godlike Productions[5]
gollark: Interesting view.
gollark: Not everyone actually acts ethically, so clearly not.
gollark: Very possibly.
gollark: If it's much smarter than you, you aren't going to be able to meaningfully monitor it.
gollark: I mean, it sort of kind of does.

See also
  • Hollow Earth — A larger category, although most of these nuts believe we're on the "outside" of the cell.
  • Flat Earth — Yes, people really still believe this.
  • Geocentrism

Notes
  1. His argument consists mainly of quote mining Darwin to insistently assert that "Darwinism", the "undulating theory of light",File:Wikipedia's W.svg and the rest of the science of the time are based on "mere conjecture" — "a mere guess" that wants to be accepted without any evidence.
  2. Technically an oblate spheroid, but what's a few miles?

References
  1. The Cellular Cosmogony, or, The Earth, a Concave Sphere by Koresh & U. G. Morrow (1898) Guiding Star Pub. House.
  2. Koreshan State Park
  3. "The Wonderful Properties of Radium" by Koresh (1906) In: Flaming Sword pp. 204-208 (archived from May 25, 2019).
  4. The Cellular Cosmogony (1922), chapter Koreshan Cosmogony in Contrast with Modern Astronomy: "…Darwinism is a fair sample of the processes by which modern scientific conclusions are invariably reached…"
  5. WE LIVE INSIDE A HOLLOW SPHERE, THAT CONTAINS THE WHOLE UNIVERSE by Anonymous Coward 996709 (06/08/2010 11:21 AM) Godlike Productions (archived from 7 Jul 2013 13:05:02 UTC).
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