Hollow Earth
Sign in to savehistorical concept proposing that the planet Earth is entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- superseded scientific theory
- Image
- Map of the Interior World (1892, B&W version).png
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- Commons category
- Hollow-earth theories
- topic's main category
- Category:Hollow Earth
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Encyclopedic overview
A cross-sectional drawing of the planet Earth showing the "Interior World" of Atvatabar, from William R. Bradshaw's 1892 science-fiction novel, The Goddess of AtvatabarThe Hollow Earth is a concept proposing that the planet Earth is entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space. Notably suggested in the late 17th century by Edmond Halley, the notion was later disproven, first tentatively by Pierre Bouguer in 1740, then definitively by Charles Hutton in his Schiehallion experiment around 1774.
It was still defended through the mid-19th century, notably by John Cleves Symmes Jr. and J. N. Reynolds, but by this time it was part of popular pseudoscience and no longer a scientifically viable hypothesis.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hollow Earth” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.