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Requires no exotic dimensional physics.

For the same reasons we humans never visited either the North or South poles, until we developed the technology to do so a few hundred years ago.

It's too cold at the edge, and (like our poles) too cold a hundred miles from the edge. Antarctic temperatures, below -100C. Throw in tornadic winds that could literally lift a herd of elephants, and it is too lethal. The winds prevent any sort of balloon or aircraft from getting close enough.

Of course, if your population develops space flight, they will see the edges eventually; and by science I can know it is not a sphere (one might hypothesize the world is a sphere like Earth but with just one cold pole; however such a sphere has an equator, and you can travel in a straight line due East and reach your starting point: There is no such straight line on the disc world). By science I can know it is a disc (Shadow length and orientation relationships on the habitable part can prove flatness, while mapping of the cold edge, as close as we can get to it, proves circularity).

Actually reaching the edge to peer over it requires some very high tech.

Added: There is another psychological deterrent: Although we can determine the habitable area is a disc (the length of the ice border rules out a small ice cap), we cannot prove there is an edge: The habitable area may be a circular warm spot on an ice plain that could be thousands or millions of times wider than the habitable area itself. With such a possibility, there is no certainty an edge could ever be reached, giving an exploration to find an edge a near certain suicide mission in the eyes of most.

posted about 7 years ago