Over two thousand years ago, a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round using a stick, some shadows, and a level of basic geometry, something most people master by age 12. He didn’t even need a budget or a documentary crew. He just needed a stick and a brain that was pointing in the right direction.
Fast forward to 2019 and Bob Knodel, a prominent Flat Earther from the United States, decided that two millennia of scientific consensus, satellite imagery, space exploration, and the entire field of astrophysics were all wrong, and that he was the man to prove it.
The flat-earth theory is still called a theory because no one has ever been able to prove it
One particularly dedicated flat-earther thought he could prove it by building his own $20,000 gyroscope
Bob Knodel was not messing around. To prove once and for all that the scientific consensus of the last two thousand years was wrong, he built a laser gyroscope. That is a precision instrument that measures rotational movement, and it came at a personal cost of $20,000. The logic, in Flat Earth terms, was sound enough. If the Earth is not rotating, a gyroscope would detect no drift.
If it is rotating, it would detect exactly 15 degrees of drift per hour, the precise rate at which a spherical Earth spinning on its axis would produce. Knodel set it up and turned it on, and thankfully filmed the results for a Netflix documentary. To the untrained eye, the experiment simply involved sheets of cardboard and a torch, but he was determined that it would work in his favor.
But his contraption did the exact opposite of what he intended; it proved the Earth was round
And to nobody’s surprise, the experiment did not work, and the gyroscope detected 15 degrees of drift per hour. To the decimal point. Exactly what it would detect if the Earth was, in fact, round and rotating. He stood there and said "interesting" to himself, which is the understatement of the century.
Rather than doing what most people would do when their own experiment produces irrefutable evidence against their position, Knodel took a different approach. He went on YouTube and explained that he was simply not willing to accept the results. "What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift," he said.
But instead of admitting he was wrong, he tried to disprove his own experiment
"A 15-degree per hour drift. Now, obviously we were taken aback by that." He admitted it was "kind of a problem" before explaining that he and his team had begun actively looking for ways to disprove their own experiment's findings. Which is, in scientific terms, the opposite of how science works. The experiment had done exactly what a good experiment is supposed to do, but Knodel just did not like what that result was.
This was all captured on a Netflix documentary
Behind the Curve, the Netflix documentary that captured all of this, was released in February 2019 and featured not just Knodel but several other prominent Flat Earthers alongside scientists and astrophysicists who appeared to offer some gentle, well-evidenced perspective.
The film is a fascinating and occasionally heartbreaking portrait of a community so committed to a belief that no amount of contrary evidence can shift it. Bob Knodel left this round earth in 2023, aged 62, still a Flat Earther to the end.
At its core, Flat Earth theory holds that the Earth is not a sphere but a flat disc typically depicted with the Arctic at the centre and Antarctica as a giant ice wall around the outer edge, presumably to stop everyone from falling off. The sun and moon, in this model, are not the enormous celestial bodies that conventional science describes but smaller, closer objects that move in circular patterns above the flat plane like spotlights.
Gravity, as we understand it, does not exist in the Flat Earth model either. Instead, the disc is accelerating upward at 9.8 metres per second squared, which conveniently produces the same sensation as gravitational pull without requiring a spherical planet.
NASA, world governments, airlines, satellite companies, astronauts and essentially every scientist alive are all, according to Flat Earthers, part of an elaborate and extraordinarily well-coordinated global conspiracy to keep the truth hidden. Why they would do this, and how they have managed to maintain it across centuries, countries, languages and political systems without a single credible whistleblower, is still up for debate.
The Flat Earth Society, for what it is worth, does maintain an active website. It is accessible from anywhere in the world. On a device that works via satellites. Orbiting a sphere.
Have you ever thought this theory might hold some water? Tell us why in the comments!
People in the comments were very amused by the irony of it all
