Dear MindReach Members,
Part 8 of my series regarding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' (or Mormonism's) teachings regarding the location of the lost ten tribes in the hollow earth examines the various proposed physics models of a hollow earth by their respective proponents. A scientific objection to the hollow earth was raised by Orson Pratt in 1875, answering a letter from John C. Hall regarding the lost ten tribes' location. Pratt argued from Newton's shell theorem that "a globular shell can have no internal attraction in any direction," so that anything within it "never could fall to or reach the surface," a state of things "utterly incompatible with mortal existence," and Pratt's own proposal conceived of the tribes on the outer surface of the earth, yet still at the north pole.
The scientific answers which the hollow-earth theory's advocates have given such objections are examined herein, the principal ones being as follows:
The pushing-gravity tradition which runs from Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Georges-Louis Le Sage through Lord Kelvin (via a 2002 academic anthology, "Pushing Gravity") posits that if gravity is a push from outside rather than a pull between masses, then a hollow shell partly shields whatever lies inside it, instead of leaving it weightless. Gregory Leo Harrigan's "The Great Gravity Myth" (1983) denies the universal law of gravitation outright, holding that attraction runs "to the surface only," so that the earth "could be solid, or it could be hollow."
Jan Lamprecht's "Hollow Planets" (2nd ed., 2014), an extensive scientific feasibility study and survey of cultural traditions, documents that measurements of the gravitational constant taken in deep mines and boreholes have consistently come in above the laboratory value, which he reads as a possible sign that the earth is hollow, and proposes that earthquake waves bend around a central cavity rather than pass through a dense core.
Joseph H. Cater's "The Awesome Life Force" (1984) posits that gravity is not a property of mass but a radiation produced in the outer crust and screened out at depth, so that weight fades to nothing some 700 miles beneath the surface and "the earth and other planets are hollow from logical and theoretical considerations."
These and other authors on the subject are discussed, including the Latter-day Saint author Rodney M. Cluff, the Qabalist/esotericist Frater Akiba, and Raymond Bernard, whose classic "The Hollow Earth" (1964) argues from geography rather than physics as such, moreover featuring the demonstration filmed aboard the International Space Station which has been discussed on this forum in the past, e.g.: [ALLPLANETS-HOLLOW] Watch "Mita's New Sun theory explains Hollow Earth and demolishes "hot fusion"" on YouTube
The next part will deal with various maps, diagrams, exposés, and novels that grew up around these cosmic questions.
