Isn't there a Flat Earth Society, still active, pretending there is
a conspiracy leading us to believe that the Earth is spherical, and
especially that all photographs from the Appolo missions and other
satellites are clever fakes ?
To come back to a topic closer to the History of Mathematics, the
point is not whether there are now more people believing a particular
statement about the solar system but what is the proportion of
these people who feel confident they can convince any reasonable
interlocutor by explanation, reasoning and experiment that this
statement is true.
Likewise, how many not-immediate mathematical phenomena are we
ready to explain and demonstrate to anyone passing by without
depending on arguments of authority ?
Isn't there also a link between periods of greater rigor and
axiomatization of mathematics and periods of massification of its
teaching ?
Olivier Gerard