Temat 4: A hollow Earth?

Space and straightness pose subtle challenges. Some strange people maintain that all humans live on the inside of a sphere; they (usually) call this the hollow Earth theory. They claim that theMoon, the Sun and the stars are all near the centre of the hollow sphere, as illustrated in Figure 29.
They also explain that light follows curved paths in the sky and that when conventional physicists talk about a distance r from the centre of the Earth,the real hollow Earth distance is r = R² _Earth/r.
Can you show that this model is wrong?
Roman Sexl* used to ask this question to his students and fellow physicists. The answer is simple: if you think you have an argument to show that this view is wrong, you are mistaken!There is no way of showing that such a view is wrong. It is possible to explain the horizon, the appearance of day and night, as well as the satellite photographs of the around Earth, such as Figure 28. To explain what happened during a flight to the Moon is also fun. A consistent hollow Earth view is fully equivalent to the usual picture of an infinitely extended space. We will come back to this problem in the section on general relativity.
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Another famous exception, unrelated to atomic structures, is the well-known Irish geological formation called the Giant’s Causeway. Other candidates thatmight come tomind, such as certain bacteria which have (almost) square or (almost) triangular shapes are not counter-examples, as the shapes are only approximate.

FIGURE 29 A model illustrating the hollow Earth theory, showing how day and night appear (© Helmut Diehl).