watch many of them. A cursory introductory clip asserting
that the planet is a stationary disc, with the sun and the
moon circling above it, sparks a lot of questions. What
about the seasons? What about solar eclipses? For many
people, these are answered by more flat Earth videos. Even
haters tend to help the cause; they film reaction footage or
get into drawn-out comment fights that drive traffic.
Celebrities have an effect too. Rapper B.o.B., social-
media personality Tila Tequila, and NBA player Kyrie
Irving have all questioned whether the Earth is round. But
none has gone so far as to appear at an event with every-
day flat-Earthers. This year, organizer Robbie Davidson
has hinted that an A-list star will show up, and conference
attendees have been specu-
lating for days. Some suspect
it will be Will Smith. Sargent
hopes that the secret guest,
whoever it is, will give the
movement a boost.The next day, Knodel shows
up in the Crowne Plaza’s
conference room wearing a
lab coat. The roughly 650 at-
tendees who join him, armed
with selfie sticks and tri-
pods, look a lot like America.
There are senior citizens,
families toting young kids,
and people of all colors. The
media sometimes portrays
the flat Earth movement as
a white male pursuit, but in
fact, it has the same problem
that plagues the scientific es-
tablishment, along with the
rest of the country: Its leaders
are mainly white men.
The organizers stream
most of the conference to YouTube. Presentations en-
compass topics like how to bring up their beliefs with
friends and family, and how to spread the word for max-
imum impact. (One suggestion for guerrilla activism:
Cue up tiny speakers to spew flat Earth arguments, then
hide them in elevators.) At worst, the tone of the sessions
is reductionist and confrontational. People crack jokes
about “flat-smacking” and “flat-rolling” believers in the
globe—that is, shutting them up by reciting evidence that
supposedly supports a plane model.
Looked at one way, flat Earthism is the ultimate conspir-
acy theory, a rejection of the very ground we walk on. Butlooked at another, it is an expression of empiricism, a reluctance
to accept as truth anything that cannot be seen with our own eyes.
For every die-hard extremist, there are people who had set out
earnestly to answer the question: Why isn’t the Earth that we look
at round? In its better moments, the event is like a mirror image
of an establishment scientific conference. There is a session on
the moon, another on the scientific method, and a panel dealing
with gender representation in the movement.
That afternoon, I wander into a presentation by Stephen Knox
and Paul Lindberg, known to the community as Knoxy and Paul
on the Plane. They focus on gravity, which is commonly cited as
proof Earth is round. Newton’s law of universal gravitation holds
that objects with less mass are pulled toward the center of objects
with more mass. On a round planet,
humans fall downward toward
the center of the sphere, no matter
where they are on the surface. If the
Earth were a plane, we’d probably be
pulled toward the center of the disc;
Australians could find themselves at
the North Pole. But Knox asks, what
if gravity doesn’t exist?
Knox is a video-game developer
and animator based in Philadelphia.
Back in 2014, he was working on
an animation for a science- fiction
novel he’d written called Plas-
tic Life, in which characters live in
a massive petri-dish-type enclo-
sure. In order to visualize how the
sun and moon would rise and set in
that world, he looked up how peo-
ple had envisioned Earth when they
believed it was a level plane. He
thought the search would be a his-
torical exercise, until he stumbled
upon Sargent’s Flat Earth Clues on
YouTube. Intrigued, he joined a flat
Earth Facebook group. Nonbeliev-
ers regularly trolled the discussion,
and Knox, who had a talent for
math and physics, soon found him-
self debating them. Lindberg, another member, spotted Knox’s
ability and invited him onto his show, which broadcasts on the on-
line radio station Truth Frequency Radio.
Then one day while helping some physics students make a
short film, Knox shot a helium balloon rising. When he viewed
the footage, he accidentally watched it upside down, so the bal-
loon looked like it was falling. He started to wonder if gravity was
in fact buoyancy working in reverse. He theorized that the force
that separates an object from the air and fluid around it—what he
terms discidial force—determines if objects rise or fall, along with
the difference in density between the object and the surround-
ing fluid or air. He wrote a paper on the topic and emailed it to an78 FALL 2019 • POPSCI.COM
“Once you
talk about
gravity not
existing,
scientists
will not talk
to you.”
—STEPHEN KNOX