Sophia Webb

Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe! assembles experiments, anecdotes, and vignettes to argue that Earth's surface is planar, circled by an Antarctic ice barrier, and roofed by a nearby, circling sun and moon. Written in forthright Victorian prose, the treatise privileges everyday sight over mathematical abstraction, invoking canals, horizons, and perspective to counter Newtonian cosmology. Interleaving diagrams with courtroom-like cross-examinations of navigators and astronomers, it positions its 'zetetic' method - inquiry before hypothesis - within the bustling culture of nineteenth-century popular science and public lecturing.
Parallax was the pen name of Samuel Birley Rowbotham, an itinerant English lecturer and autodidact whose observations along the Bedford Level fens convinced him that orthodox astronomy misstated observable reality. Moving among working-class debating societies and dissenting circles, he cultivated suspicion of elite expertise and a zeal for repeatable demonstrations, which shaped both his teaching and this defiantly empirical book.
Recommended to readers of the history and sociology of science, this volume is a primary source in the rhetoric of counter-science. Read it alongside contemporary astronomical manuals: its provocations illuminate how authority, evidence, and spectacle intertwined in the Victorian marketplace of ideas, and still animate public reasoning today. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted.
Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.