Dr. Fred Nadis's Cabinet of Curiosities

          I admire a natural philosopher who invents an idea of the universe so original and patently false that it becomes oddly persuasive. One is confronted with the issue: either this theory is insane or I am insane , and the theory makes you rather hope that you are the deranged one.  Cyrus Teed, with his notion that we all lived inside a hollow Earth was one such philosopher. Yet he met his match in the post-Sputnik era. One of the loopiest, yet most compelling theories of the universe, or at least of earthly and celestial topography, can be found in F. Amadeo Giannini's, Worlds Beyond the Poles a 1959 amplification of his earlier work, Physical Continuum .          Giannini had a very curious insight. In fact, revolutionary. As the first paragraph of his book explains, "There is no physical end to the Earth's northern and southern extent. The earth merges with land areas of the universe abo...

“The new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom…the world is all outside: it has no inside.”        --Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience.” "Your inside is out and your outside is in."           --John Lennon "Everybody's Got Something to Hide"                  It takes a bold philosopher to disagree with Ralph Waldo Emerson. A young contemporary of Emerson,  Cyrus Teed was that man. Emerson’s profound declaration that the world “has no inside”?  Nonsense.  We were there already. Teed was a rural physician with training from the Eclectic Medical College in New York, a tradition which rejected heroic chemical cures and blood-letting and favored herbal and electrical remedies. Teed also was a latter-day alchemist, thirsting after the very secrets of the universe;  and, in...