I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.
This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.
I’ve been following this as it is mildly entertaining and have been pleasantly surprised that Will has pretty much never mentioned religion, god, or anything non-secular, as far as I have seen anyway.
Not all of them are FE dummies, tho.
Question: would you claim to be a flat-earther just to get a trip to Antarctica?
Please. Can someone set me right?
If the Earth were a static disc then anything farther than 24/2pi (=3.8197) light hours away would be moving faster than the speed of light.
Is this wrong or trivial please?
One day at my job a guy (Tom) from another department approached me and my co-worker. Tom started by saying if a helicopter lifts off and hovers at one hundred feet above the ground for 30 minutes when it lands why does it come down in the same place? Waiting for a nice explanation he then said “the world is flat, and the helicopter experiment proves it (otherwise the helicopter would come down in a different spot). I was stunned I couldn’t speak, same for my co-worker who is in non-religious. Tom then talked for 10 minutes about the flat earth through a religious eye, and all I could do was listened and utter uh huh. I don’t know why the helicopter does that but I’m certain there is a very logical explanation. This conversation blindsided me, and since the only thing I say to him is hello Tom. Every time I see him engaged in conversation with a customer or co-worker I wonder if he is pontificating his nonsense. I’ve made the decision to say away from him because I’m afraid I’d lose it if we got into a discussion. Would not be worth it.
@2 Reginald…
Free trip to Antarctica? Why, yes. Yes I would claim to be a ‘Flat Earther’.
I have this amazing experiment with a marble that should only work with 24 hour sunlight.
Where do I sign up to get my grant?
stuffin: it’s pretty simple honestly, the inertial frame of reference for the planet means that yes, if you go up, you should still be moving rotationally at the same speed as you were on the ground. The problem is, 100 feet and 30 minutes is nowhere near enough time for the ground level and the “100 feet up level” speeds to desync far enough for you to notice.
In 30 minutes, the earth rotates approximately 360/48 degrees, or 5 degrees of arc. The earth has a radius of approximately 6371 km, or 6.371 million meters. 100 feet is about 30.5 meters. So we can now figure out how far you will travel by considering the 5 degrees of arc at ground level and 100 feet up.
6,371,000 * 2pi / 48 = 833961.95 (rounding to the nearest centimeter)
6,371,030.5 * 2pi / 48 = 833965.94 (rounding to the nearest centimeter)
This is a difference of 4 meters, or about 13 feet. Note: the standard size for the SMALLEST helipad in Canada is 5 meters.
This of course is considering 0 km/h windspeed. The reason why you end up in the same spot is because you’re not spending enough time in the air, and you’re not going high enough. It’s the same argument about “oh I climbed this hill but the horizon is still flat, checkmate”. They don’t understand the sheer scale of the planet and how much spheres (or sphere approximates) look flat when you zoom in far enough.
@4, 6
A helicopter has active correction of its position. Try the same experiment with a balloon. The odds of it coming down in the same spot are close to nil.
Of course it’s movement is due mostly to the influence of winds, which vary in time and place, and not directly to the curvature of the Earth.
There is, buried in the definition of hovering. We don’t usually explicitly state it, but hovering means holding position relative to the ground. We don’t have a neat term for holding position relative to distant astronomical reference points, and if we did it would throw up all sorts of problems around the Earth moving along its orbit as well as rotating.
There’s also the point that the atmosphere (which the helicopter is hovering in) rotates along with the surface, which is why we’re not all being buffeted by ~1000 km/hr winds right now.
BTW the coriolis effect is not strong enough to affect your bathtub [contrary to urban myths], but it will affect the trajectories of long-range artillery.
The Royal Navy noticed that during WWI when they used artillery tables for the northern hemisphere at the battle of the Falkland Islands (the future German amiral Canaris was one of the survivirs of the battle).
Sure, use your fancy numbers and “mathematical” equations and “scientific” explanations all your want. I do my own research and it tells me that the Earth is flat and the helicopter test is just one more piece of evidence that I’ll include. No egg-head, pointy haired, lab-coat wearing geek will ever convince me otherwise.
submoron@3: Moderately distant objects moving faster than the speed of light is a problem of a static earth. The problems with a flat earth start long before that and while I haven’t studied all the different flat earth theories in depth, I’m pretty sure nearly of them reside in a universe where stars are something very different.
Even Ken Ham has spoken out against Flat Earth believers. This is significant.
Hope Gross @6: No, Dunc @8 has the gist of it. If the windspeed relative to the ground at whatever height the helicopter is hovering is zero, it will stay put above the same point on the ground.
There is a drift westwards at landing for objects fired straight up, that’s due to the Coriolis force (as birger @9 notes), which depends on the velocity of the object.
Most flerfs have a severe misunderstanding of the scale of the earth. A basketball will look flat to a microorganism that’s the same scale of a human relative to earth. I think the vast majority of them, like something on the order of 99.99999%, are trolls in it for the yucks or have made a career and good living out of looking stupid on the internet, which seems to be the only reliable way to make a living on the internet.
Mordred@11. Many thanks for sorting that out for me. The speed of light business occured to me independently and I wanted to know whether I was right or not.
Yes, I’m aware of Alfred russel Wallace and the canal experiment as an example of the problems. I had a copy of the ‘Universal Gravity a Universal Lie’ pamphlet which ended in the assertion that seen through a telescope ships shrink in size rather than disappearing below the horizon hull first.
@6 Hope Gross: nice calculation.
I’d like to explain for others, why the helicopter scenario is used by flat earthers.
They think that if the helicopter goes straight up, hovers for 30 minutes, then lands, it should come down in a different place. Their reasoning is that the tangential velocity of the earth’s surface is about 1000 mph. if the helicopter is up in the air for 1/2 hr, it should land about 500 miles away from where it started because the earth rotated underneath it. but it doesn’t do this. so they think it’s a “gotcha!” argument.
this argument ignores the inertia of the helicopter and the atmosphere. if the helicopter goes up, Hope Gross’ calc shows that the helicopter does move a bit relative to the earth, if there is no atmosphere. but nowhere near 500 miles, because physics.
by the flat earther reasoning, if you are passenger in a car on the freeway, and toss a ball up, it should land 50 feet behind you, since the car moves 50 feet ahead away from the ball.
this flat earth argument ignores inertia, conservation of momentum, and everyone’s experience travelling in cars.
birgerjohansson@12
No, it says even a jesus-soaked religious whack job can’t always be wrong.
That’s almost giving them too much credit. I think that would be pretty relatable. We all fail to grasp the true scale of the planet to some extent.
But most of us don’t literally think that a plane flying from Japan to Australia ends up in inverted flight. Or that Australians are upside down and would fall off “if the Earth was a ball”. Or that helicopters and baseballs and falling leaves should accelerate to a thousand miles per hour as soon as they lose contact with the surface…
Well, as far as the major flerf internet personalities, I agree. I think most or all of them are just in it for the grift and don’t actually believe what they’re saying (does Poe’s law cover that?). If nothing else, their reluctance to take a free trip to Antarctica proves they know perfectly what they — and their followers through them — would have seen.
But that’s the thing: I do think most of their followers are genuinely fooled. People like the guy stuffin @4 was talking about.
Which is scary.
@16 Robbo
There are complications. A car has an enclosed air space. So imagine a rail car. A tossed ball will behave different in a closed box car (with an enclosed air space) vs a flatbed car, where the ball is exposed to the wind. With wind exposure, the behavior of the ball depends on its density. A billiard ball will behave differently from an inflated hollow rubber ball. I guess you could mount a giant vacuum chamber on a train car…
birgerjohansson @ #12 — “Even Ken Ham has spoken out against Flat Earth believers. This is significant.” Dan McClellan has a piece out that starts with a video of some Christians citing Biblical verses…Ezekiel I think…use of a word which they translate as “orb” or “sphere”. They are making the claim that the Biblical writers knew that the Earth is a sphere. McClellan says they are mistranslating the word to gin up an apologetic. The word used in the passage actually means “circle” or “disc” which is consistent with the cosmology of the time of writing: the Earth is a disc that sits in an encircling ocean which is surrounded by a wall of ice. McClellan isn’t defending flat-earth but refuting bad Bible scholarship.
It’s the 1000mph rotation speed that can’t get out of their thick skulls. You just can’t measure the earth’s rotation like that. It’s 15° per hour…or twice as slow as an analog clock. Someone needs to set up a merry-go-round with a motor that rotates it at this speed and tell them to sit on it and see if they can feel it moving.
Robbo @16: It depends what you mean by “the helicopter goes straight up”. If “straight up” is defined as, say, following the direction of a cable tethering a helium ballon to the ground (with 0 wind speed), then the helicopter will not drift relative to the ground as it climbs and then hovers.
If, however, you mean that the helicopter exerts a constant downward force (after initial acceleration upwards), then it will experience a Coriolis force sideways (towards the west) while it ascends (a climb “straight up” as defined in the first paragraph would entail correcting for this force as the helicopter ascends). And if we ignore air resistance, its westward speed when it reaches a height of 30.5 metres will be about 0.0045 m/s at the equator (multiply by cos(θ) at latitude θ).
So, if we can ignore sideways air resistance (both during ascent and hover), the chopper will drift about 8 metres westwards in half an hour. Big if in the real world.
Motion in a rotating frame of reference is rarely simply explainable.
Thanks everybody for your explanations. Didn’t realize it could be that complicated, I was thinking gravity would be the answer.
Hmm, it was maybe a valiant attempt, but I doubt Flatties are amenable to reason, else they would not be what they are.
I remember a luxuriantly-bearded chap in a video, yelling “You don’t tell me what to think!” at some courageous astrophiles who had the temerity to set up some experiments to show that by Jove the world is indeed round. To expect such as they to actually observe and reflect is expecting too much.
This said, I would most certainly pretend to be one of them in order to score a trip to Antarctica… dignity you say? What’s that? I know it not.
@submoron #3:
It’s irrelevant, basically — flerfs (speaking generally) don’t believe in space, as we usually think of it. They will often refer to “the firmament”, by which they imagine a literal dome over the Earth, in which the stars are embedded. The Sun and Moon aren’t part of it, but they’re small objects, only perhaps a few hundred miles in size and distance. Etc. Don’t ask for details, they of course don’t really have coherent models, because no flat Earth model is compatible with reality. Usually they’ll try to switch up their model depending on the argument. But “the firmament” represents the most common view, AFAICT.
@24 I expect that’s mostly true. But I did watch a pretty good little Netflix(I think?) doco about flat earthers, wherein a group of younger flat earthers proposed an experiment with lasers and canals to prove it one way or the other. In the doco, they trotted out a bunch of flat earth spokespeople / talking heads / scam artists, who all had ready-made excuses for why the experiment would show that the earth was round but still be wrong. But the encouraging thing was the young students who proposed the experiment in the first place, who basically said “Huh; guess it’s round after all”, and walked away.
@stuffin #23:
Gravity is key to what holds the Earth together as it rotates — and here “the Earth” includes the atmosphere, and things within it, as well as things that touch the surface — but flerfs don’t understand, or even believe in, gravity. With a straight face, they’ll present you with a wet ball, and point out how the water fails to cling to the bottom, and say that this shows the Earth (by analogy) can’t be round. I kid you not. (There are many variations on this theme.) Maybe not all of them are that obtuse, but I’ve seen it repeatedly.
Re: faster-than-light stars. This was an objection to the geocentric model even before Copernicus. Some astronomers realised that the distant stars, if rotating around the Earth, must be travelling at extraordinary speeds. Of course, they had no idea how distant the stars were (Ptolemy’s estimate was 20 au, out by a factor of ~190,000 for the nearest star) and no idea that the speed of light was a universal limit. Most astronomers, of course, just shrugged and put those rotational velocities down to divine powers.
After reading this, I was curious what the little Nazi flathead Eric Dubai was up to. His webshite was the first big source on flat earth stuff I found and he seems to be pretty influential in the scene.
Seems he hasn’t published anything new in the last two years or so. Either he has fallen from the edge of the earth or moved to Youtube or Xitter.
Anyway when I clicked on a few of the rambling articles I found a few interesting points about experiments. In one article he claimed moonlight could not be reflected sunlight, as it was substantially different: Sunlight focused with a magnifying glass on a thermometer would warm it, moonlight would actually cool it. As a source he cited some 19th century text.
In another place he claimed the old observation of ships vanishing behind the curvature or the earth was an illusion of perspective and with a modern telescope or zoom lens the seemingly hidden parts of the ship would become visible again. This was simply given as a fact.
Of course both claims are absolute nonsense to anyone with basic knowledge about reality, but they could also be easily demonstrated. Take a magnifying glass and two thermometers out on a moonlit night or take a camera with a big zoom lens to an convenient shore. Simply film the results.
Either the flat earthers on the site are so sure of their case that they don’t think experiments are necessary or they are actually much less sure than they seem and the don’t dare to test their theories.
@Nemo #25: Good point Sir. I remember having ‘discussions’ with a colleague who insisted that the point of view (spherically based) in Dante could still be defended. I was tempted to introduce him to the relevant chapter in Gardner’s ‘Fads and Fallacies’
Thanks @chrislawson # 28: Your further clarification is very welcome.
Am I really going to be the first pedant here to note the Earth is actually not a sphere but an oblate spheroid?
( See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spheroid#Oblate_spheroids & see highly exaggerated here – The Earth’s Geoid by the Bad Astronomer, almost 50 seconds long.
Oh and does using the term globe get around that?
Isaac Asimov’s old book’‘The Relativity of Wrong’ springs to mind here..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong
Yeah, Ham doesn’t like YEC being compared to Flat-Earth. During the Nye-Ham debate, Ham pointed out that we have pictures of Earth from space, which can be seen as round (and he showed a standard image from NASA).
It bothered me, because people correctly believed the that the Earth is round for thousands of years before NASA came along and taking pictures of the Earth became possible. The roundness of the Earth was an inference made from observations and calculations.
YEC is indeed like Flat Earth because both are cults that dogmatically reject scientific observations and calculations that disprove their respective dogmatic beliefs about the Earth and wider universe.
I don’t think that all ancient flat models of the Earth were so specific that they all had a wall of ice at the rim. Some may have had a ring of mountains; others may well have imagined that there was no boundary and that one could indeed fall off the edge. I think the “wall of ice” notion may well date to Flat Earthers trying to fit Antarctica into the flat model.
There is a write-up of ancient Rabbis arguing over where the sun went at night — whether it traveled over above the top of the solid firmament to the other side so that it could rise again in the east under the firmament, or whether the sun traveled under the earth to rise in the east.
https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/suns-path-at-night
This wasn’t even getting as far as the basic idea of geocentrism, which would have the sun going around behind the Earth in its orbit; and that the “firmament” is a sphere rather than a dome.
@31 “ Am I really going to be the first pedant here to note the Earth is actually not a sphere but an oblate spheroid?”
Yes, that would be pedantry. Indeed, the Earth is not a perfect sphere but that deviance from being a perfect sphere is incredibly small. The radius at the equator is 6,378 km while at the poles it is only 6,356 km, a difference of only 22 km or about one-third of 1%.
So, technically correct. The best kind of correct.
I myself would not call 22 km “incredibly small”.
Besides, it’s lumpy as well, what with the mountains and so on.
Mount Everest is less than half that, so it’s only half as big as “incredibly small”.
Context, John. 22 km is 0.00345 times the mean radius of the Earth. Mountains are a few km above sea level at most. So ‘sphere’ is what we would call ‘a good first approximation’.
Rob, it was not I who determined the context: “So, technically correct. The best kind of correct.”
John, rrhain made the context clear in the paragraph preceding the sentence you quoted. The variation in the Earth’s radius is much less than the radius. Stop cherry-picking. Stop digging.
I was curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B#Experimental_setup
“At the time of their manufacture, the gyroscopes were the most nearly spherical objects ever made (two gyroscopes still hold that record, but third place has been taken by the silicon spheres made by the Avogadro project). Approximately the size of ping pong balls, they were perfectly round to within forty atoms (less than 10 nm). If one of these spheres were scaled to the size of the Earth, the tallest mountains and deepest ocean trench would measure only 2.4 m (8 ft) high.[15]”
Owlmirror at 33:
That’s what I thought too. BTW, ancient Finns (and probably many others) believed that the sky is a solid dome-like ceiling that curves down and joins the ground at the edges of world.
Specifically, this ceiling was said (perhaps whimsically) to be so low near the edges that only small halfling-type people could live there. The edge was also said to be “home of birds”, or the place where migratory birds go to spend the winter. Hence, the halflings were called “bird home people”. In modern Finnish, “bird home” is a metaphor for a cozy, sheltered place.