And so did all the medieval philosophers and scientists in all scholarly traditions that used concepts from Greek astronomy and astrology, which was quite a lot of influential people.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the vast majority of ordinary people in those cultures didn’t subscribe to traditional flat-earth cosmologies, but then they didn’t have the job of predicting eclipses and other celestial events that really require a reasonably accurate mathematical model.
One determined flat Earth believer embarked on an ambitious experiment documented in the 2018 Netflix film “Behind the Curve.” Recently, this experiment has gained viral attention due to its unintended outcome. Estimates suggest that approximately $20,000 was invested (equivalent to 75,000 shekels) to produce an experiment intended to irrefutably prove the flat Earth concept.
< snip >
The failed experiment intended to provide unequivocal evidence supporting a flat Earth inadvertently proved the Earth’s spherical nature. Despite the results, the unwavering belief in a flat Earth persists among some individuals. This intriguing case serves as a reminder of the complexities of human perspectives and the challenges of confronting deeply entrenched beliefs.
(There is a one minute YouTube video in the story above which distills what they did for their experiment…not sure why it would be so expensive to do that though.)
Let me guess . . . Jeranism, CORRECT!
I think the big bucks were forked out for the gyroscope weren’t they? Which subsequently showed the Earth turns once a day (obviously).
No, that’s not true. We’ve discussed this before in other threads. Geocentric models were not flat-earth models any more than 2D paper maps are flat-earth models.
Further, the concept of the vault of heaven doesn’t imply a solid substance.
You should get this,
Thanks Bob!
The amazing thing is we really need not go to all that trouble.
Take a flat earther to a port and have them watch ships/sail boats come in. They will see the masts before the hull as they come over the horizon. Indeed, I think this was a big part of how ancient societies figured it out.
Yep haha
Oh you sweet summer child…
All you need is a P900 and you’ll be able to zoom those ships right back into your personal dome of vision, as long as visual angle of attack is correct and the bottom up obstruction of the atmosplane isn’t causing the electric nature of light to defract because of the electric nature of the sun and the black sun.
One argument for a flat earth that always stuck with me was from a documentary about fundamentalist Christianity. The guy being interviewed said the earth had to be flat because when Jesus returned, he would descend from heaven, and every human on the planet would witness this event. So, of course the earth is flat because how else could the return of Jesus be seen by everyone at the same time?
I say yes they are trolls since they refuse to accept any proof that counters their position. They will tell you
Cavendish’s experiment doesn’t prove gravity
Bob Knodel’s 15 degrees per hour of drift are caused by cosmic forces (the æther?)
Hull down ships can always be brought into full view by zooming your P900
See! You can see Mt XXX or YYY Building from a further distance than 8" per mile-squared (itself wrong) would allow. Ignore the fact that you can’t see the bottom half
Jeranism’s famous laser over water experiment that fit round Earth math perfectly was “inconclusive”.
Etc.
There’s a forum that I visit from time to time. The people there post multiple articles daily and many have been doing so for years. They will argue passionately with you if you try to debunk anything they’ve said…it’s certainly a lot more effort than anyone would put into trolling.
So, I’m sad to say, they are real believers.
If that seems hard to comprehend, you have to appreciate that it is a product of virtually zero science education, and spending 100% of their time on “alternative” sites like bitchute.com, that are nonstop pushing this crap.
Also, you won’t be surprised to hear this, but there is a lot of correlation between belief in flat earth and belief in CTs and antivax. In fact, a 100% correlation one way, IME (that is to say, every flat earther I have met has been antivax, but not everyone who is antivax is a flat earther, of course). It is all a lot less cute when the topic switches from “water does NOT stick to a spinning ball!” to “Sandy hook was clearly a false flag and those supposed ‘parents’ are actors”.
There used to be a Flat Earth Society here in Chester UK. They would sometimes have a booth in the street handing out literature and preaching through loudspeakers.
I was never really sure if this was serious or some kind of street theater?
They seem to have disappeared since Covid.
There is no point in trying to debate it, of course. If it’s street theater you are just feeding the game.
And if they are serious, they are at best delusional and could become violent…
Indeed, there are many such organizations around the globe.
There seem to be a lot of flerfs (and anti-flerfers) on X/Twitter, not that I pay much attention to them. They come across as relatively harmless nutbags.
The same can’t be said for germ theory deniers, who have sprouted up like toxic toadstools since the pandemic (which they deny, using terms like viroliegy). Such people appear committed to their bizarre beliefs, not that I see any making an effort to be bitten by a rabid animal, travel to an Ebola-endemic region or be transfused with HIV-positive blood in order to prove that viruses don’t exist.
Every single flat earthier on the planet has encountered this argument, and it doesn’t hold for them. They will claim either it’s a trick of perspective, light refraction, or some combination thereof. They’ll also say they can “pull it from beyond the horizon” with a sufficiently powerful telescope or lens.
They also have responses for how people in South Africa can see the same stars at due south as people in Argentina, even though on the flat earth map “south” is pointing in completely different directions for them.
However, I have yet to see one of them attempt to explain how stars in Northern Hemisphere rotate counterclockwise around Polaris, but in the Southern Hemisphere they rotate clockwise around Sigma Octanis (which, again, can be seen by people on opposite sides of the flat earth facing completely different directions).
The explanations for long distance southern hemisphere airline flight times (Capetown to Sydney sorts of flights) is rather lacking as well. With their map these should be immensely longer than they really are.
Globe, yeah right…
Sadly, believers exist. They’ve always existed, gathering around whatever insane belief about reality happened to be well publicized at the time.
All you have to do is look back 70 years (70!) when Martin Gardner published a history of crankdom called In the Name of Science (1952), which became famous in 1957 when a paperback edition called Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science made it available to everybody. Probably every edition since, and there have been many, has attracted another million readers to the rationalist viewpoint. His demolition of several dozen “fads” - some of which disappeared, but most still can be found in some form today - is repeatedly short and brutal.
Nobody can possibly say how many people read the book and had their beliefs reversed. Certainly some, yet a new generation of believers appears with fateful regularity. Also certainly, many of the beliefs are bolstered by religion; “God did it” is an irrefutable statement and a wall against objective fact that is unscalable. If God decided that Earth would be a disk in an universe of planets and stars that are spherical then no more explanations are needed. Science is therefore a force designed to undermine God’s works, which is not limited to flat earth but underlies a spectrum of otherwise inexplicable beliefs.
And some, I assume, are trolls, to paraphrase someone else with inexplicable beliefs.
There are lots of things that they can’t explain.
I mean obviously pretty much every large-scale phenomenon causes problems for FE, but in most cases they can at least think of some ad hoc handwavey explanation (that may be completely inconsistent with their explanation for the last phenomenon).
But sometimes they will admit that they cannot even do that.
For example, a flerfer recently tried to put the point to me that Venus shouldn’t be visible in the night sky, since it is always closer to the sun than us (and presumably he had in mind a distances not to scale solar system diagram, where venus is just 4 or 5 times its diameter from the sun).
I responded that venus is only visible in the early or late evening, and doesn’t rise high in the sky. And you could even see this in the times and photos taken on his FE site. I asked what the FE explanation was for this.
And he had none. So after trying to change the topic a couple of times, he went to the stock answer that FE is an “individual journey” and you have to “do your own research”.
I’m not mentioning this story to show off at pwning a flerfer…that’s obviously not much of a boast. I’m just giving an example of how this always plays out. It’s something of a cult, and you aren’t going to be able to reason someone out of it.