Yesterday, on CBS Sunday Morning, they had a segment on flat-earthers. Are these people just ignorant or are they putting us on?
I was once on a cruise ship at sea on a pristine cloudless evening. As I stood on the deck, I watched the sun disappear below the horizon. As soon as the sun vanished, I ran up a flight to the next deck and witnessed the sun setting again about 10 seconds later.
What are some other simple ways we, as common folk, can demonstrate that the earth is round?
The fact that no one has ever come to an edge.
To paraphrase Scott Kelly on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, if there were an edge don’t you think that’d be a cool place to visit?
The circumference of the earth was estimated in about 240 BC by Eratosthenes. That pretty much implies that the earth is spheroid.
Lunar eclipses
As the Earth passes between the Sun and Moon, it always produces a circular shadow. It’s not possible for a flat, disk like Earth to always produce such a shadow. Only a nearly spherical world can do that.
I don’t see these conditions as being mutually exclusive.
OP here. I like this proof.
On the CBS segment, one flat-earther had a model where both the sun and moon were above the horizon and ran in a circle above the earth. After all, both the sun and the moon are each visible somewhere at any point in time. So, if the sun and moon were both above the flat earth, what is casting a shadow on the moon?
Watch this video from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I consider NDT to be a pompous ass but he communicates complex science issues well and he can be a most useful mammal.
They deny this proof by saying that the moon is self-illuminating, and that lunar eclipses are the moon cycling through something. It’s irrefutable in its pure lunacy. Those are the arguments that I think are good at just being able to point at the flat earth movement and hold them up as crackpots.
What I find to be a solid argument is time lapse photos of the stars from the northern hemisphere, the equator, and the southern hemisphere, side-by-side-by-side.
Good news and bad news.
The bad news: A lot of shapes other that spheres produce circular shadows from every angle. Meissner Bodies (relatives of the Reuleaux triangle), for example.
The good news: These are more complicated than spheres, would require quite extraordinary Physics to explain why the Earth has that shape, etc.
A lot of simple things can show deep problems with Flat Earth nonsense. E.g., why can’t people in the N. Hemisphere see stuff at the celestial S. pole and vice versa. Call someone on the opposite side of the Earth and ask them what time of day it is. And on and on.
Of course a few Flat Earthers come up with Magical “Physics” to explain this and a million other things. But outside of simple drawings and such they have no real Math, Physics, experiments, data, etc. to back them up.
I was going to post exactly the same point. The beauty of it being that it is something that can be easily replicated by any suitably motivated flat-earth nutjob.
You need two groups of people, some sticks and string if you are feeling technical and the ability to roughly measure distance and manipulate angles by means of simple formula.
It is one the great experiments of that, or any age.
That’s not a definitive proof.
I like this proof too, but I wonder how the Flat Earthers argue against it.
About the recent solar eclipse, on the wiki page for Modern flat Earth societies,
ftg, those shapes don’t cast circular shadows. Here’s a picture of some.
Bullitt, want to lay odds that the argument, in full, consists of “the details of the eclipse prove that the Earth is flat!”, with no actual calculations?
In this case it is since we’ve circumnavigated the Earth both East-West and North-South, so we’ve exhausted the search space. We can’t prove that there isn’t a hole through the Earth we haven’t found in this way, but I don’t see any flat earth model that would allow this kind of circumnavigation.
No, according to Flat-Earth logic, that’s no more definitive than if you said that someone you know saw Sasquatch, Santa Claus and the little dog from the old Taco Bell commercials downing tequila shooters at last year’s cinco de mayo celebration. It’s an anecdote. What kind of physical, tangible proof can you show me that you personally have made that journey? Oh, you have none? Well then you’re just lying to support the conspiracy!
There are a lot of really stupid people out there.
CoolHardLogic has some wonderful YouTube videos debunking their nonsense, along with the geocentrists. They’re fascinating to watch not just for the animation, but the elegant simplicity of the math and physics.
OP here. When they interviewed some of these nuts, they also said that the moon landing was a hoax, so no one is on the moon to create the illusion of an eclipse “cycling”. How do these whack-a-doodles explain how we know, in advance, when a lunar eclipse will occur.
You might not have intended that pun, but it’s the best one ever.
Is there even a point to looking for a “definitive proof” for flat-Earthers? Just for fun, I looked up what they believe the edge is. Apparently, it’s an ice shelf, Antarctica. Like this.
Evidence gathered through the use of science is easily dismissed through the use of idiocy.