What is new on Empirical Earth

What has changed on Empirical Earth, newest first. New claims answered, entries updated, and improvements to the site. The reference is maintained, and challenges that hold up get added here with a sourced response.

Two things worth knowing before you scroll. Everything here is linkable. Every one of the 189 entries, 216 glossary terms and 41 equations has its own address, so you can send someone the single claim you are arguing about instead of the whole site. Hover any entry and a copy-link button appears. And you can build your own list. The claims index lets you tick the claims you want, save them under a name, and export them as a cue sheet you can read off, paste into a chat, or print.

July 2026

New Two Panama Canal entries. The canal puts an ocean at each end, 42 miles apart, under a Moon 239,000 miles away that cannot tell them apart. Their tides differ by more than fifteen times in range and about three hours in timing, because what sets a tide is the shape of the basin, not the strength of the pull. And the canal needed two separate definitions of sea level, because mean sea level at the Pacific end sits about eight inches above the Caribbean end. A 1926 survey paper notes the Canal Zone is the only place on Earth where bench marks on the sea level datums of two different oceans can be joined by a short line of precise levels. Both entries say plainly what they do not show: the locks are a water elevator over hills and prove nothing about curvature, and eight inches disproves a flat sea surface without proving a round Earth.
New Entry 34: the lumpy geoid picture. NASA released a geoid visualization on 15 July 2026 and it went round as proof that the Earth is a potato. The image is real and it is NASA’s. The caption printed with it says the heights are exaggerated by a factor of 10,000, and gives the true range: +85 m at Iceland to −106 m over southern India, on a radius of 6,371,000 m. That is 3 parts in 100,000. Shrink the Earth to a billiard ball and the entire range becomes 0.86 micrometers against a manufacturing tolerance of 0.127 mm, so a real billiard ball is a far worse sphere than the Earth is.
New Entry 127: the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The largest current on Earth flows east around Antarctica and returns to the longitude it started from. It was measured continuously from 2007 to 2011 by 19 inverted echo sounders and 3 current-meter moorings on the seabed of the Drake Passage. Water can only come back if there is something to travel around, and a rim has an inside and an outside but no way around. The entry reports the disagreement in the literature rather than one tidy figure, and says plainly what the current does not show: it measures the shape of the water, not curvature.
Updated Moonbounce Doppler, worked out in full. Five new points in the moonbounce entry and a new equation in the appendix. A signal bounced off the Moon comes back off frequency by twice the transmitted frequency times the range rate over the speed of light, and the range rate is mostly the Earth turning under the antenna: 465.1 m/s at the equator, scaled by the cosine of the station latitude, the cosine of the lunar declination and the sine of the local hour angle. Two stations at different longitudes measure shifts of opposite sign at the same instant, and the zero crossing tracks each operator’s own local meridian. A stationary plane gives every station the same shift.
Updated The Blue Marble now carries the whole camera setting. The entry said “one frame of 70 mm film” and stopped there. It now gives the record: a Hasselblad 500EL with an 80 mm Zeiss Planar at f/2.8, on Kodak Ektachrome SO-368 reversal film, shutter fixed at 1/250 second, focus at infinity, from about 29,000 km. Two new points explain why those numbers matter: an 80 mm lens on that format is the normal lens, so Earth appears about the size the crew saw it, and the frame is one of a near-identical sequence with 22725 and 22726. The physical transparency also carries uniform emulsion grain, edge perforations and the Hasselblad reseau crosses, printed onto the film by the camera.
New Entry 97: the Flat Earth Dome Model. An interactive dome simulator circulates as proof of a working flat Earth. Its author, Walter Bislin, defends the globe and built it to demonstrate the opposite. Every position it draws is computed from NASA JPL ephemeris data in the heliocentric model and then projected onto the disc, and to connect those positions to an observer the app bends light along curves no known physics produces, differently for every observer and only at sea level. He added a warning to the top of the page because of this exact misuse, and lists by name the sites that removed his description and presented the model as their own.
Updated The twenty-year gap in the Michelson story is filled. The entry jumped from 1887 to 1979 and skipped the generation in between. In 1958 Charles Townes, who had just invented the maser, pointed two ammonia-beam masers in opposite directions on a rotating rack and reran Michelson and Morley with it, through 1958 and 1959. Null. He did it again with helium-neon lasers once lasers existed, which they did not in 1958. That is the real answer to the claim that Michelson proved a motionless Earth: the experiment has been rebuilt every time somebody invented a sharper instrument, usually by the person who invented it, with a Nobel waiting for whoever broke it.
Site Every formula card can be copied whole. The two buttons on each equation only ever handed over the formula, and dragging a selection across a card gave mangled text, because the formula is built from superscript tags and the symbol list is a grid. A third button on all 43 cards now copies the entire thing as clean plain text: the formula, the plain-language explanation, every symbol with its meaning, the worked example, the analogy, and a link back to the card. Paste it into a message and the other person gets the whole explanation rather than a line of algebra.
New Entry 125: Captain Cook and the 60,000 miles. The claim is that Cook sailed 60,000 miles along an ice wall and never found a way through. The figure is real and the entry concedes it in the first line: it is the total distance his ship logged in three years across the whole southern ocean, including Tahiti, Easter Island and two refits in New Zealand. His own Cape Horn passage gives his pace, 5,000 miles in 36 days. At that rate a lap of the Antarctic Circle takes 71 days on a globe and 489 days on the flat-Earth map, out of a voyage that lasted 1,103 days. And at his furthest south Cook wrote that the ice reached “quite to the Pole, or perhaps joins to some land” — the man cited as proof there is no pole said he thought there was one.
Updated Does it matter which way a gyroscope spins? Three new points in the gyroscope entry. For a free gyro measuring drift the answer is no, and that makes it a control experiment: reverse the wheel and you still read 15 degrees times the sine of your latitude per hour, because the number belongs to the Earth rather than the machine. For a gyrocompass the answer is yes, and the entry concedes it: reverse the rotor and the pendulous weight has to move from above the gyro to below it or the thing will not settle on north. And the sense of the drift reverses at the equator, clockwise north of it and anticlockwise south, which is the same sign flip the ring laser shows using a spinning brass wheel instead of a laser.
Site Diagrams now describe themselves to screen readers. Nine figures carried no text alternative, so anyone using a screen reader met them as blank space. Each now has a written description of what it shows, and the decorative search icon is marked to be skipped rather than announced.
Updated What an optical resonator actually is, and why it is frozen. The word was used without ever being explained. A cavity resonator is a rod of glass with a mirror at each end: the laser only builds up when a whole number of wavelengths fits exactly between them, the way a guitar string only rings at lengths that fit a whole number of half-waves. That makes it a ruler whose tick marks are wavelengths of light. It is cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero because glass expands with temperature by far more than the effect being looked for, and the ruler has to stay the same length while you read it. The rotation entry also now answers the model where the ground is still and the sky turns above it: a ring resonator does not measure the sky, it measures whether the box is turning, so a stationary Earth predicts zero everywhere.
Site 121 more terms now link to their definition. A third of the glossary had definitions written but nothing pointing at them. The first use of a term in each entry that uses it is now a link, across 72 entries. Terms that double as ordinary English words were left alone, and the rhetoric terms in the method primer stay unlinked because they are there to be browsed.
New A page for the rotation argument on its own. Twenty-three claims and answers about whether the Earth turns, gathered into one page you can hand to somebody mid-argument. Grouped by what kind of instrument does the measuring: mechanical, optical and quantum, astronomical, relativistic, then the consequences a spinning planet leaves on itself, then the objections that backfire. Five families of instrument sharing no principle and no century, all returning the same rotation rate and the same axis.
Updated The modern Michelson-Morley paper, answered from its own abstract. A 2003 Physical Review Letters paper by Müller, Herrmann and colleagues gets held up in debates as proof of a motionless Earth. The Michelson entry now names it, and answers it with the sentence printed in its own abstract: the resonators were subject to the Earth’s rotation. The planet turning is what swept the apparatus through every orientation across a year of data. Without it there is no experiment. The entry also explains why the follow-up had to build its own turntable: relying on the Earth’s spin left the direction along the spin axis unconstrained.
New The rotating optical resonator, with copy-and-paste equations. A sealed optical loop that reads the Earth’s spin with no view of the sky. The flat-Earth answer, that the instrument sees some rotation and the cause is assumed, is stated at full strength and then answered by the shape of the signal: it scales with latitude, it reverses when the box is turned over, and three rings at right angles recover one axis. A flat disc turning about its center would give every laboratory the same reading. Two new equations were added to the appendix with plain-text and LaTeX copy buttons.
New The silent aircraft with no moving parts. MIT really did fly a silent, propellerless plane on electric fields in 2018, and the entry concedes it fully. It is also a fixed-wing aeroplane: the wings lift it, the electric drive replaces the propeller by throwing air backward, it does nothing in vacuum, and it weighed 2.45 kg until it hit the gymnasium wall.
New The Exodus Effect and propellantless drives. A NASA electrostatics scientist with a real record says his company’s solid-state device produces thrust from electric fields alone, in vacuum, beyond one g. The entry concedes all of it: the credentials are genuine, the method excludes the obvious explanation, and the work is unproven rather than debunked. It still does not reach the conclusion drawn from it. A thrust quoted in multiples of g is measured against gravity, and so is every helicopter and hot-air balloon.
New The 1794 “star seen in the dark part of the Moon”. A genuine Royal Society paper is passed around as proof that a star was seen through the Moon. The paper says in: a point of light on the Moon’s own unlit portion. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, published it, published a second witness beside it, added his own remarks, and noted that Aldebaran was being occulted that same evening. Nothing was buried, and the modern occultation record settles the physics.
New Entry 173: Colin O’Brady’s 2018 Antarctic crossing. The claim is that he never made the journey and that no GPS record exists. Both halves get an honest answer. His billing as the first solo unsupported crossing does not survive scrutiny, and there is no downloadable archive of his track. But his position was public and live throughout, a rival skier and a logistics operator logged it separately, and the investigators who criticize him place him on a named haul road at named coordinates. The geometry settles the rest: his start and finish are 82.6° of longitude apart, about 1,400 km through the pole on a globe, and roughly 27,800 km on the flat-Earth map.
Fix Printed sheets now carry their own definitions. A glossary link is worth nothing once a page is printed, so an exported set now ends with a “Terms used” section holding the full definition of every linked term in it. Four units that the site used but had never defined — the micrometer, the nanometer, the decibel and the watt per square meter — are now in the glossary and linked where they appear.
New Send someone your whole set as one link. A set of claims is saved in your own browser, which is no help when you want it on your phone or in somebody else’s chat window. The share link carries the set itself, so opening it anywhere rebuilds the same list, named and ready. Links that have gone stale load the claims they still recognise and drop the rest.
New Build your own talking points. Open the claims index, tick any claims you want, and save them under a name. Reopen the set later and add to it. Export it as plain text to paste anywhere, or as a page that opens formatted in any browser and prints itself on white paper. There is a switch to include each claim’s “what would change my mind” line, and the sets can be backed up to a file so clearing your browser cannot lose them.
Site Link to any single claim, term or formula. You do not have to send anyone the whole site. All 189 entries, 216 glossary terms and 41 equations have their own address, and every entry carries a copy-link button, so the one claim under discussion can be handed over on its own.
Site Every page now lists every other page. A companion-pages directory in the footer of the reference and of each companion page, so arriving on one of them from a search result no longer dead-ends.
Site Share any page in one click. A copy-link, X and Reddit control in the footer of every companion page, filled in from whichever page you are on.
New The Black Swan oil rigs. The viral clip of two California oil platforms filmed whole from miles offshore, added to the “you can see too far” entry. The shot is taken inches above cold water, the setup that bends light downward the most, and the same rigs have been filmed on other days with their bases cut off.
New Clouds that seem to pass behind the Sun. The viral “local Sun” claim, explained as an overexposure illusion you can reproduce with a lamp and tracing paper.
New The Earth did not fly away while Apollo was in transit. Why a moving Earth did not strand the crew: the ship, the Moon and the Earth all share the same orbital speed, so it cancels.
New The Antarctic Treaty is an open-inspection pact. The treaty orders rival inspection of every base and does not ban travel, the opposite of a secrecy pact. A “read the treaty” link was added to Resources.
New Fram2: a private crew orbited directly over both poles. The 2025 first crewed polar orbit, filmed from overhead and independently tracked from the ground.
Updated Blue Marble. Added the April 2026 Artemis II Earth photos, “Hello, World” and “Earthset,” the newest human-taken full-disc images of Earth.
New The path to space. A dozen-milestone timeline of the human climb to orbit and the Moon, from Sputnik to the crewed Artemis II flyby.
New The phone in your pocket already runs on a round, spinning Earth. GPS, its relativity correction, and the whole-globe compass model, none of which has a flat-plane version.
New Run it yourself: five checks in the curvature calculator. Added to the 8-inch-rule entry, tied to Walter Bislin’s Earth-curve tool, showing where the globe and flat models diverge.
Changed Feedback is now Challenge us. A standing invitation to prove an entry wrong with a measurement, a photo, or a source. Well-posed challenges get added here.
Updated Artemis, current through 2026. The Moon-landing entries reflect the crewed Artemis II return of April 2026.
Site Faster, and friendlier on phones. Edge caching and deferred rendering for speed, a simpler five-item menu, a reworked front page, and a mobile layout that turns the wide measurements ledger into readable cards.

Earlier

Launch The reference went live with more than 160 sourced entries across shape and curvature, gravity and the air, rotation, flight and navigation, the sky, radio, space and satellites, the Moon landings, the boomerang proofs, history and the cosmos, and hands-on tests you can run yourself.