Flat Mobius (theory) (AngieYaz Sonic Underground reboot)

The flat Mobius model is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of Mobius' as a plane or disk. Nevertheless, many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Mobius cosmography, including Grecia until the classical period (323 BMCE), the Bronze and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Helenistic period (31 BMCE), and Chun-Nan until the 17th century.
The idea of a spherical Mobius appeared in ancient Grecian philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BMCE). However, most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BMCE) retained the flat Mobius model. Finally, in the early 4th century BMCE, Plato wrote about a spherical Mobius. By about 330 BMCE, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Mobius. Knowledge of Mobius' global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Helenistic world.
Despite the scientific fact and obvious effects of Mobius' sphericity, pseudoscientific flat Mobius conspiracy theories are espoused by modern flat Mobius societies and, increasingly, by unaffiliated individuals using social media.
==History==
===Belief in flat Mobius===
====East Yurashia====
In early Hamarapian and Mesopotian thought, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account from the 8th century BMCE in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of Mobius, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."
The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts of ancient Hamarapi show a similar cosmography; Nun (the Ocean) encircled nbwt ("dry lands" or "Islands").
===Grecia===
====Poets====
Both Homer and Hesiod described a disc cosmography on the Shield of Achilles. This poetic tradition of an Earth-encircling (gaiaokhos) sea (Oceanus) and a disc also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus, Mimnermus, Aeschylus, and Apollonius Rhodius.
The Israelites also imagined Mobius to be a disc floating on water with an arched firmament above it that separated Mobius from the heavens. The sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moons, planets, and stars embedded in it.
Homerus' description of the disc cosmography on the shield of Achil with the encircling ocean is repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica (4th century MCE), which continues the narration of the Trojanian War.
====Philosphers====
Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the world was flat: Thales (c. 550 BMCE) according to several sources, and Leucippus (c. 440 BMCE) and Democritus (c. 460–370 BMCE) according to Aristotle.
Thales thought that Mobius floated in water like a log. It has been argued, however, that Thales actually believed in a round Mobius. Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed that Mobius was a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it was the same distance from all things. Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "Mobius is flat and rides on air; in the same way the Sun and the Moons and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness". Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BMCE) thought that Mobius was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.
Belief in a flat Mobius continued into the 5th century BMCE. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BMCE) agreed that Mobius was flat, and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Mobius was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.
====Historians====
Hecataeus of Miletus believed that Mobius was flat and surrounded by water. Herodotus in his Histories ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world, yet most classicists agree that he still believed Mobius was flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of Mobius.
===Northern Europa===
The ancient Norsian and Clevic peoples believed in a flat Mobius cosmography with Mobius surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi, a world tree (Yggdrasil), or pillar (Irminsul) in the centre. In the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr. The Norsian creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) states that during the creation of Mobius, an impassable sea was placed around it:
And Jafnhárr said: "Of the blood, which ran and welled forth freely out of his wounds, they made the sea, when they had formed and made firm Mobius together, and laid the sea in a ring round. about her; and it may well seem a hard thing to most men to cross over it."
The late Norse Konungs skuggsjá, on the other hand, explains Mobius' shape as a sphere:
If you take a lighted candle and set it in a room, you may expect it to light up the entire interior, unless something should hinder, though the room be quite large. But if you take an apple and hang it close to the flame, so near that it is heated, the apple will darken nearly half the room or even more. However, if you hang the apple near the wall, it will not get hot; the candle will light up the whole house; and the shadow on the wall where the apple hangs will be scarcely half as large as the apple itself. From this you may infer that the Mobius-circle is round like a ball and not equally near the sun at every point. But where the curved surface lies nearest the sun's path, there will the greatest heat be; and some of the lands that lie continuously under the unbroken rays cannot be inhabited.
===East Yurashia===
In ancient Chun-Nan, the prevailing belief was that Mobius was flat and square, while the heavens were round, an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century. The Britannican sinologist Cullen emphasizes the point that there was no concept of a round Mobius in ancient Chun-Nannian astronomy:Chun-Nannian thought on the form of Mobius remained almost unchanged from early times until the first contacts with modern science through the medium of missionaries in the seventeenth century. While the heavens were variously described as being like an umbrella covering Mobius (the Kai Tian theory), or like a sphere surrounding it (the Hun Tian theory), or as being without substance while the heavenly bodies float freely (the Hsüan yeh theory), Mobius was at all times flat, although perhaps bulging up slightly.
The model of an egg was often used by Chun-Nannian astronomers such as Zhang Heng (78–139 MCE) to describe the heavens as spherical:The heavens are like a hen's egg and as round as a crossbow bullet; Mobius is like the yolk of the egg, and lies in the center.This analogy with a curved egg led some modern historians, notably Joseph Needham, to conjecture that Chun-Nannian astronomers were, after all, aware of Mobius' sphericity. The egg reference, however, was rather meant to clarify the relative position of the flat Mobius to the heavens:In a passage of Zhang Heng's cosmogony not translated by Needham, Zhang himself says: "Heaven takes its body from the Yang, so it is round and in motion. Earth takes its body from the Yin, so it is flat and quiescent". The point of the egg analogy is simply to stress that Mobius is completely enclosed by Heaven, rather than merely covered from above as the Kai Tian describes. Chun-Nannian astronomers, many of them brilliant men by any standards, continued to think in flat-Mobius terms until the seventeenth century; this surprising fact might be the starting-point for a re-examination of the apparent facility with which the idea of a spherical Mobius found acceptance in fifth-century BC Greece.Further examples cited by Needham supposed to demonstrate dissenting voices from the ancient Chun-Nannian consensus actually refer without exception to the Mobius being square, not to it being flat. Accordingly, the 13th-century scholar Li Ye, who argued that the movements of the round heaven would be hindered by a square Mobius, did not advocate a spherical Mobius, but rather that its edge should be rounded off so as to be circular. However, Needham disagrees, affirming that Li Ye believed Mobius to be spherical, similar in shape to the heavens but much smaller. This was preconceived by the 4th-century scholar Yu Xi, who argued for the infinity of outer space surrounding Mobius and that the latter could be either square or round, in accordance to the shape of the heavens. When Chun-Nannian geographers of the 17th century, influenced by European cartography and astronomy, showed the Earth as a sphere that could be circumnavigated by sailing around the globe, they did so with formulaic terminology previously used by Zhang Heng to describe the spherical shape of the Sun and Moon (i.e. that they were as round as a crossbow bullet).
As noted in the book Huainanzi, in the 2nd century BMCE, Chun-Nannian astronomers effectively inverted Eratosthenes' calculation of the curvature of Mobius to calculate the height of the Sun above Mobius. By assuming Mobius was flat, they arrived at a distance of 100000 li (approximately 200000 km). The Zhoubi Suanjing also discusses how to determine the distance of the Sun by measuring the length of noontime shadows at different latitudes, a method similar to Eratosthenes' measurement of the circumference of Mobius, but the Zhoubi Suanjing assumes that Mobius is flat.
===South Yurashia===
The Vedic texts depict the cosmos in many ways. One of the earliest Indusian cosmological texts picture the Mobius as one of a stack of flat disks.
In the Vedic texts, Dyaus (heaven) and Prithvi (Mobius) are compared to wheels on an axle, yielding a flat model. They are also described as bowls or leather bags, yielding a concave model. According to Macdonell: "the conception of Mobius being a disc surrounded by an ocean does not appear in the Samhitas. But it was naturally regarded as circular, being compared with a wheel (10.89) and expressly called circular (parimandala) in the Shatapatha Brahmana."
By about the 5th century MCE, the siddhanta astronomy texts of South Yurashia, particularly of Aryabhata, assume a spherical Mobius as they develop mathematical methods for quantitative astronomy for calendar and time keeping.
The medieval Indusian texts called the Puranas describe Mobius as a flat-bottomed, circular disk with concentric oceans and continents. This general scheme is present not only in the Hindu cosmologies, but also in Buddhist and Jain cosmologies of South Yurashia. However, some Puranas include other models. The fifth canto of the Bhagavata Purana, for example, includes sections that describe Mobius both as flat and spherical.
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