Can You Prove Earth Is Round? Tamara Sheville's Level Plane Poems
Can you actually prove the Earth is a rotating globe? Before recording this episode, I tried to falsify Flat Earth and find the strongest case for the conventional globe model, and couldn't. Tamara Sheville joins InnerVerse to put the globe on trial through a rapid-fire examination of curvature, level water, horizons, Antarctica, long-distance visibility, Polaris, atmospheric pressure, vacuum experiments, Foucault's pendulum, Earth rotation, gravity, planetary observations, and the classic disappearing-ship argument. This isn't built around one supposed “proof.” The question is: what happens when the assumptions behind the globe are examined one after another against measurement, observation and experiment.
Tamara Sheville joins InnerVerse to put the globe on trial through a rapid-fire examination of curvature, level water, horizons, Antarctica, long-distance visibility, Polaris, atmospheric pressure, vacuum experiments, Foucault's pendulum, Earth rotation, gravity, planetary observations, and the classic disappearing-ship argument.
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In this episode
Core themes
Rhymes Written For Her Parents
Tamara traces her turn to a Dave Weiss interview she heard during the jab season, after which her brain ran nonstop and she filled thick notebooks. When Weiss ran a contest for short, concise flat earth proofs, she remembered the birthday card rhymes her grandfather used to write, and the Level Plane Poem series followed. She wanted something gentle enough for her veterinarian father and her OBGYN grandfather. Chance notes that the biggest problem with flat earth proponents is how easily they berate people who never had reason to question the globe, and Tamara calls the transition painful and gut wrenching.
The Curvature Case In Court
Much of the episode turns on a lawsuit. Tamara recounts Zen Garcia's fifteen thousand dollar challenge to demonstrate curvature with three repeatable, testable proofs. William Thompson believed he had done it, sued for the money, and lost, because he could not establish curvature beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. She pairs that with Nathan Oakley's book Measured Flat, arguing that every practical measurement, plumb, level, elevation, latitude, longitude and the compass, is taken from a horizontal plane of reference. Chance plays along on air, pointing north, south, east and west, and she calls that a flat plane of reference.
Water, Containers, And Ice Walls
Tamara carries a keychain bubble level and says the horizon stays at eye level from beaches, planes and balloons rather than dropping away on both sides. Water, she argues, is always flat and level, takes the shape of whatever holds it, and cannot keep its position without containment, which is why she treats Antarctica's tall shoreline cliffs as the rim of an enclosure rather than an edge to fall off. Chance stresses nobody claims a pizza floating in space, and raises the firmament dome, quoting Marty Leeds that everything beyond it is metaphysical. Tamara likens open gas beside a vacuum to propane without a tank.
Polaris, Tides, And Terminator Lines
The pair run through solar system mechanics. Tamara says a lit ball should show a clean terminator line and equal day and night, that tides rise on both sides of the planet while fresh water ignores the moon, and that gravity cannot hold the moon at 238,000 miles while astronauts float 250 miles up. Her Polaris poem multiplies six trillion miles by 433 light years to mock the scale, and she invokes the inverse square law. She points to the Georgia Guidestones hole always framing Polaris, and to Mercury and Venus appearing at dusk and dawn, dismissing refraction as the answer given for everything.
Steelmanning The Globe On Air
Chance says he spent days trying to falsify his own position, treating pole to pole circumnavigation as the strongest test, and found stories and a few photographs but no receipts. He plays a TikTok using a sculpture, a fiber optic camera and a toy boat, calling it a flawed experiment because a tabletop cannot reach the vanishing point, while granting that ships really do appear to vanish from the bottom up. Tamara answers with zooming in, perspective, and magnets in the Foucault pendulum. Chance concedes not every item in her books may hold up, yet says rocket thrust in a vacuum is heavy enough alone.
Quotes
“Not only were we lied to in school all the way through school, but by the government, by NASA, by the medical community, by the news media.”
“He wanted his money, decided he had proven it, went to court, and Zen Garcia won.”
“I was trying my hardest to convince myself that I was wrong about it and find any reason to think that the globe was actually right and flat earth was wrong.”
“How can they float 250 miles up but the gravity is so strong that it's holding the moon in place 238,000 miles away?”
“Well, things just work differently in space, Tamara.”
“He got a breach of his suit and immediately his tongue started to boil. Water boils in a vacuum.”
“If the pendulum works to show the rotation of the earth, how come jumping doesn't?”
“Everything that's there is there because we're thinking critically about it and there appears to be a problem here. You really can't just shrug off the bulk of all of these different things.”
Tamara Sheville is the author of the Level Plane Poem series, six volumes of illustrated verse arguing that Earth is flat, level and motionless, covering curvature, surveying, navigation and celestial observation. Her sixth book, Flat Earth Fun-Damentals, makes the case that Earth is charted, mapped, flown, navigated, surveyed, engineered, constructed and measured flat. She has also written Nuclear Weapons Truth Bomb: An Explosion of Lies, a book length work in rhyming verse that takes apart the physics of the atomic bomb, a topic she approaches as a former member of the first civilian chemical biological terrorism response team.
See all Tamara episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
