Wikipedia deletes a founder of expanding Earth theory

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Wikipedia editors opposed to Earth expansion have deliberately deleted the page from Wikipedia describing the work of the celebrated German scientist Ott Christoph Hilgenberg... one of the founders of the expanding Earth theory.

Perhaps none of us should be too surprised by this deletion. After all, opponents of expansion have already infiltrated Wikipedia to deliberately eradicate a major portion of Earth expansion history.

I've previously reported in 2014 about the "call to arms" by opponents of expansion on Wikipedia. This resulted in the gradual removal of most scientists who support expansion and the deletion of much of the latest evidence. Present-day geologists, who are considered to be the leaders in this field by their peers, are still routinely deleted within minutes.

On the other hand, the blatant removal of Hilgenberg’s page could be considered even more shameful since he is famous world-wide as one of the original scientists outlining the concept of Earth expansion.

Hilgenberg was a geophysicist – before such a term was generally recognised – who studied the geology as well as the physics of the Earth. He wrote one of the first books about expansion, Vom wachsenden Erdball (The expanding Earth) in 1933, and constructed the very first expanding globes to illustrate the concept. This is all simply a matter of historical record.

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Wikipedia editors claimed they could ignore every mention of Hilgenberg

Wikipedia editors opposed to Earth expansion have deliberately deleted one of the founders of the expanding Earth theory

Hilgenberg globes at the 2011 Interdisciplinary Science Meeting in Erice

The snapshot above is from the cover of Hilgenberg's 1933 book which features a photograph of the first globes demonstrating the expansion concept.

Virtually every accurate history of the Earth expansion concept mentions Hilgenberg as one of the first originators of the theory. Although he died in 1976, in 2001 geologists organised a science meeting to debate the expanding Earth concept and dedicated the meeting to Hilgenberg. Specially manufactured reconstructions of his globes were displayed at that 2001 meeting and also later at the Expanding Earth colloquium held in Erice several years later in 2011.

The Hilgenberg globes have even featured in a television documentary about expansion shown in Germany, France and Russia.

Here’s a snapshot from that television documentary showing the Hilgenberg globes. There is a playlist of multiple unloads of that documentary on YouTube from the German, French and Russian versions of the television documentary. If you don’t speak any of those languages it is possible to set YouTube to translate the commentary.

But the Wikipedia editors opposed to expansion clearly don't want you to know any of that.

Here's a picture of those same reconstructed Hilgenberg globes I took at the 2011 Interdisciplinary Science Workshop on “The Earth Expansion Evidence”, held at Erice in Italy. Hilgenberg's globes are at the back, while a small version of a more modern reconstruction (one of Klaus Vogel's famous "globe-in-globe" reconstructions) is at the front for comparison.

If it seems these Wikipedia editors are trying to rewrite history, they freely admit it. They tell us they have deleted Hilgenberg because they don't concede this particular "scientist is notable". It is possible to read all their convoluted excuses to delete Hilgenberg on Wikipedia.

The editors who so casually deleted Hilgenberg claimed that they could “find no mention of him" in other historical sources, effectively alleging there were no historical references.

Yet there is a multitude of notable references available.

As one typical example, look at the reference given by the renowned British geologist Arthur Holmes in the second edition of his Principles of Physical Geology - a book so well-known to British geologists that it has been commonly referred to as simply "Holmes" by generations of geologists.

On page 35 of the second edition of "Holmes" is an illustration of Hilgenberg's expanding globes with the continents outlined in white on a darker ocean floor. The text accompanying the illustration gives a brief description of Hilgenberg's concept.

"Fig. 21. Schematic illustration to indicate the effects of expansion of the earth's interior on sialic crust that may originally have covered the entire globe. Primordial continents (white) first outlined by stretching and fragmentation, are gradually separated as they move outwards in consequence of the earth's increasing volume. Heavy material from the mantle flows into the intervening gaps and forms the floors of the growing ocean basins (black). (After O.C. Hilgenberg, 1933)".

You can look at the page of Holmes' book on Google Books.

Later on in his book, on page 965, Holmes returns to Hilgenberg and explains that he showed,

"that terrestrial expansion would bring about the splitting and gradual dispersal of the continents as they moved radially outwards during geological time, while upwellings from the mantle would fill up the gaps and so increase the area of the ocean basins."

The arguments the Wikipedia editors used to delete Hilgenberg became even more bizarre when they claimed they could simply ignore every article or book that might have ever mentioned Hilgenberg. There are hundreds of science articles and books that mention Hilgenberg so that’s a huge number of historical references to simply disregard.

Google Scholar lists even more scientific papers with a reference to Hilgenberg.

The wikipedia editors deemed that articles written in Nature, the Royal Society, Geology and New Scientist could all be ignored.

Here's a snapshot of the article written in New Scientist by Hugh Owen, a geologist who worked at the Natural History museum in London at the time. You can read most of the article for yourself on Google Books.

Like the many other science articles this one in New Scientist mentions the work of "Hilgenberg, who, in 1933, had suggested that the Earth's continental crust had once formed a complete shell covering the entire surface of a much smaller globe than the Earth we know today."

The scientific journal Nature considers itself “a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information”. The Royal Society of London thinks it has a “long history of influential scientific publishing.” Geology thinks that it “publishes timely, innovative, and provocative articles ... representing research from all fields of the geosciences”. New Scientist calls itself “an international science magazine.”

The Wikipedia editors opposed to expansion claim that all these renowned science journals “are certainly not the reliable sources Wikipedia requires ...”

It seems clear that this small band of Wikipedia editors is trying to rewrite history to fit their own distorted dogmas. They are so opposed to expansion they completely disregard any historical accuracy and censor the history they don’t like.

With the deletion of Hilgenberg the Wikipedia editors were also able to rewrite history within the main article about Earth expansion. They even claimed some of Hilgenberg’s work for an American Scientist.

You can read the Wikipedia version - they tell us that “Since 2005 J. Marvin Herndon ... proposed a novel explanation for continental fold-mountain formation at locations remote from any tectonic plate subduction zone: as the smaller, more curved Earth expanded its curvature decreased, causing surface folding.”

Despite what Wikipedia claims, it is well-known that Hilgenberg described this mountain building effect in his 1933 book about expansion. The effect has also been discussed many times since in numerous science papers.

Here’s two of the several diagrams Hilgenberg used to illustrate the mountain building effect of expansion in his 1933 book.

Since the original English article about Hilgenberg had been initially translated from the German version on Wikipedia there was dismay in Germany that these English speaking editors would simply delete a German scientist. One concerned German editor protested that there was simply no justifiable reason to remove the page about Hilgenberg, because the page was not just about his theory but about his biography and his importance in the history of earth sciences. One would not delete Eratosthenes of Cyrene from Wikipedia because his maps of the earth had been out of date for centuries, so why delete Hilgenberg? You cannot just omit one of the founders of a theory. That would be historically inaccurate and an unacceptable distortion of the history of science.

This German editor was so troubled by this deletion that he made a copy of the English language version of the Wikipedia article. Anyone wishing to read the English version of the deleted page can download a pdf copy of the orginal.

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Wikipedia Editing War on the Expanding Earth theory

A Brief History of the Expanding Earth theory here