Who laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round?

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. ‘I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or Nasa, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,’ he had once explained in an interview. ‘I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.’ In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: ‘Do your own research!’

When people who claim that the Earth is flat, or that Covid didn’t exist, or that the moon landings were faked (all these crank opinions go together, along with, inevitably, vicious anti-Semitism) say they have done their own research, of course, they usually mean they have done zero research but have instead watched hundreds of hours of other conspiracy theorists’ videos on YouTube. It is at least to the credit of one of those YouTubers, Bob Knodel, that he spent $20,000 on a laser gyroscope which he expected would show that the Earth does not spin. When, instead, he got the correct result, he later explained ingeniously: ‘We started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.’

The distrust of actual research, of ‘elite’ science, is not a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon. It was also promulgated by the notorious English socialist and quack Samuel Birley Rowbotham, whose invented anti-discipline of ‘zetetic astronomy’ made him famous as a Flat Earther in the 19th century, before he went on to poison people (including one of his own children) with phosphorus cures.