Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface

Science News,  August 12, 2006  

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HOLLOW EARTH: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface

DAVID STANDISH

In 1692, Edmond Halley submitted a paper to the British Royal Society stating that Earth is hollow. That idea, an attempt to explain Earth's magnetism, wasn't novel. Societies the world over had believed in various subterranean worlds for aeons. Standish, a professor and author, reveals how the notion of a hollow Earth has been explored in both literature and science, from Dante's Inferno to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. He describes how early expeditions to the South Pole were motivated by the search for openings to Earth's interior called Symmes' holes, and how, in the late 1800s, a man named Cyrus Teed proposed that the inhabitable world was actually on the concave surface of a globe's interior. In the early 20th century, science established the geophysical impossibility of a hollow Earth. Facts, however, haven't dissuaded legions of storytellers from imagining an inner world. Perseus, 2006, 304 p., b&w images, hardcover, $24.95.

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