On April 1, 2017, Professor Hafedh Ateb, a scientist who founded the Tunisian Astronomical Society, published a post on his Facebook page to denounce a forthcoming PhD thesis (Ateb 2017). Its subject? The geocentric universe with a flat and young Earth. It was not an April Fool’s joke.
With a bit of condescension, the astronomical (or more generally the scientific) community on this side of the Atlantic often thinks that geocentrism and young (or flat) Earth are typically American ideas. We generally ignore the regular Eurobarometers2 revealing that one third of Europeans prefer a geocentric model to a heliocentric one. We also choose to avoid seeing the multitude of YouTube videos in languages other than English explaining at length why the earth is flat or young. Indeed, few of us are doing outreach, and even fewer are tackling or simply encountering pseudosciences.