Flat earth nonsense

Anybody who uses Twitter can come across flat earth proponents. I've engaged with a number of them and they seem to be really nice, misinformed, people. They generally commit the physics folly logical fallacy. That is, they don't understand physics, but talk about it anyway. This is, of course, a special case of the personal incredulity logical fallacy.

Here follows a short list of concepts that can not be explained away by the flat earth "model". It's not an exhaustive list because that would be exhausting.


  1. Foucault Pendulum. The pendulum swings from one side to the other in a straight line, but the movement of the earth causes the floor to rotate with respect to it.
  2. Coriolis effect. The Coriolis effect explains the rotation of hurricanes and typhoons. Here's a cool video demonstration.
  3. Wallace's experiment. Also called the Bedford level experiment, is an experiment conducted by Alfred Russell Wallace on a straight, flat, canal. When eliminating refraction, the earth's curvature is demonstrated. There are other places on the globe where the experiment can be conducted.
  4. Eratosthenes experiment. Basically, the angle of the shadow the sun casts in one place is different from the angle the shadow of the sun casts at another place. When the distance between these two places is known, the circumference can be calculated.
  5. Al-Biruni's method. This can be done by one person and some math.
  6. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, the sun isn't completely visible ... 
  7. Eclipses are calculated with precision and in advance using the standard cosmological model. How does the flat earth "model" calculate eclipses?
  8. Plate tectonics. If the earth doesn't move, why can the earth's movements be measured?
  9. Star trail photography. You can take these pictures yourself.

Source: Richard Gottardo, with permission

A short list.

I hope the flat earthers I direct towards this post will examine these points and try to counter them... or be convinced the evidence is against them.

Comments

  1. Unknown15 February 2018 at 04:15

    What is up with flat Esther's lately and it seems to be spreading. There's a story of a professor at a prestigious unnamed college asking a class full of students how do they know the earth is round and 90% answered, because I've seen the pictures from space. Lol The professor says I can put a dog's head on a human body with Photoshop, would you believe that if was true? It made me laugh. There's tons of ways to prove it I mean how about the fact that the whole world isn't in daytime at the same time. Just watch the Olympics for Pete's sake and notice that bright light in the sky is on when it's dark here in the states and such. But I've seen many posts on here and facebook about that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Elholandesdelacasa20 February 2018 at 02:38

      It does seem to be spreading on the wings of ignorance. There is a war on science going on and it seems like the masses are winning. This is a loss-loss scenario.

      Some people definitely win when everybody loses, so there's an economic incentive for these people to continue their war on science.

      Delete

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