Into the Electric Collage by Ethan Andrews select When “Mad” Mike Hughes launched himself into the sky in a homemade rocket last year, leaving a torn parachute behind in a blast of steam propulsion, he was doing what scientists and doctors have done for millennia, testing a hypothesis against firsthand experience. As it happened, Hughes’ hypothesis, that the Earth is flat, has been under assault since antiquity. Still, Hughes, a stuntman who once made a world-record distance jump in a stretch limo, spent years building rockets so he could get far enough away from his sub...