Flat Earth

[allynh]

I agree, I love following "Fringe" or "Heretical" ideas. Once EU is accepted by the masses I will go looking elsewhere for the next "Heresy."

I've been looking at this for the past month. You have Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that people have not really understood.

I was "taught" Kuhn in high school, in the early 70s. When I say "taught" I mean that they told us that Kuhn said that science moved forward "step-by-step". That is a lie. He used the word "Revolutions" for a reason.

- In a "Revolution" people are usually put up against the wall and shot.

When the "paradigm shifts" occurred people's careers were destroyed. They were forced to retire -- if they were lucky -- or were simply fired and had to start over somewhere else.

The latest videos by Ghada Chehade on the ThunderboltsProject YouTube channel mentions Kuhn, but does not stress the bloodbath that will happen when everything changes. The latest paradigm has been stretched so far -- so much energy stored in it -- that when everything snaps there will be a major crisis in NASA, University, Science, PBS, etc...

Lee Smolin wrote in his book, The Trouble with Physics, that actual Physicists were forced out of University and replaced with String Theorists. Unless you believe in "String Theory" you can't get a job in the University Physics Department.

The Trouble with Physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Smoli ... th_Physics

Most people who "believe" in science are believers in "Scientism". When you have so many religious believers, and their religion is shown to be false, they will not go down quietly.

As I said, this is great for Story, not so much in the Real.

[BuckeyeFrank]

Conspiracy theories are convenient because it allows the believer to dismiss falsifying evidence.

When I see this conclusion and then using the Flat Earth mindset, I think of the climate change models. I have seen several critical articles pointing out the corruption of the data. So in FE it can be conspiracy but it also can be a lack of faith in the data. NASA has been caught making things up ( "A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Moon"
by Bart Sibrel). Or when GaryN tried to track pictures claimed to be from Hubble and ended up being sourced from SOFIA. Even in commercial ventures such as William Shatner's space flight on Blue Origin, it can be seen to have been just another staged star trek episode (or Elon Musk, a Tesla Roadster in space).
At the IFERS site, it's not so definitive. The ultimate conclusion for them is, they just don't have the faith that most of the believing world has in the public science by news release. They also don't conclude where and if there is an edge of the world. It's really mind-bending to get your head into that paradigm, but its also a fascinating exercise.

So I admire their citizen scientist, they see a completely new world with fresh eyes. It's the same impact EU theory had on me years ago.

"lack of faith in the data."
So this inspires them to create a data set they produced by their own hand. IMO
It seems to have an advantage of a divorced bias, created by the current scientific age.

[Roshi]

I do not really know if the Earth is round by personal experience, and I did not do any experiment to find out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a body of observations is synthesized to come up with a general principle.[1] It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations.[2] Inductive reasoning is distinct from deductive reasoning. If the premises are correct, the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain; in contrast, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is probable, based upon the evidence given

I must have used the method above (unknowingly). I asked the question when I was a child, was not convinced by the answer. Then later, I just knew, because of all the information around. I presume it's the same for everyone.
I also used "Reductio ad absurdum" - maybe this counts as personal experiment, or "science". I can say now that the Earth is round, and I do not need to quote or point to any source for this.

Found out about "inductive reasoning" here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27 ... ravitation

[BuckeyeFrank]

I keep thinking I'm not getting my point across. And I get this method of evaluation from Charles Chandler, who once posted, he would read good or bad theories just to see if they can explain accepted things, differently or with a fresh perspective. ( my interpretation, not a quote).

Even if FE is absurd to you, it can be a tool to observe things in ways you never thought of.

One thing they explain well is the diminishing point of perspective, which I first learned in Art class, but who knew someone would use it to explain why a ship can disappear over the horizon and with magnification and infrared photography bring it back into wiew even though its well over the theoretical horizon. There are some fun practical physics to play with, in it all.
I sympathize with the offensive nature of this long rejected theory, which I was offended by also. But further investigation has been and is useful. But on the other hand, I'm the Homer Simpson sort who is entertained with a light switch; Switch on, Switch off, Switch on, Switch off.
So this is a good fit, A?

[allynh]

You are correct, looking at the concept is incredibly useful.

I see the only way to talk about it is through Story. People are more willing to see it as fiction where you can address all of the examples in the YouTube channel you linked to.

I've added it to my Story folders as a good source.

Thanks...

BTW, Remember Nightfall by Asimov, where when the darkness came, and the stars came out, the society was destroyed, again.

It is standard in my stuff that when the doubters are shown to be wrong, they tend to go insane. As an example:

Quatermass And The Pit (1967) - Official Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=033K233GIWs

Also, watch the narrative that is generated over the James Webb Space Telescope as more images come in. I expect it to go down strange roads.

[BuckeyeFrank]

I see the only way to talk about it is through Story. People are more willing to see it as fiction where you can address all of the examples in the YouTube channel you linked to.

I've added it to my Story folders as a good source.

I feel gratified to have made a contribution.
I think that's a brilliant method and I will try to incorporate it as I study counterintuitive theories,( Make stories out of them, as a way to model the concepts and walk a mile in their shoes and interact with others).

BTW, Remember Nightfall by Asimov, where when the darkness came, and the stars came out, the society was destroyed, again.

It is standard in my stuff that when the doubters are shown to be wrong, they tend to go insane. As an example:

I think it was in one of his books of short stories, I remember it well.
Maybe this is happening in the present.
In the present, alternative news is more available, giving large populations a view of the world they have never experienced previously.

Quatermass And The Pit (1967) - Official Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=033K233GIWs

Also, watch the narrative that is generated over the James Webb Space Telescope as more images come in. I expect it to go down strange roads.

I watched the trailer, I'll have to see it, looks fun. Concerning James Webb, you have given me a sneaky bastard motivation to investigate that process now.

As far as things that surprised me about FE, is how different they interpret the data. Some examples being they used Michelson-Morley's experiment to say the earth has no motion. And how the Cavendish experiments lack the energy budget to be self-sustained and must be given outside assistance, making the earth motion, again, suspect.

[BuckeyeFrank]

. And how the Cavendish experiments lack the energy budget to be self-sustained and must be given outside assistance, making the earth motion, again, suspect.

Oops, I confused that with Foucault's pendulum..

[jackokie]

@allynh and @BuckeyeFrank

Re trying to see things from new perspectives, I'm going to give this a shot, but I suspect my "just the facts, ma'am" attitude is going to be a problem.

I usually watch SpaceX's launches; as usual, on the last launch the curvature of the Earth was quite obvious as the Falcon 9 was approaching stage separation. My main question for FE folks is: Cui bono? What would justify the enormous resources to fake all of the visual evidence? And then, where are the whistle-blowers one would expect to surface? What are the astronomers (professional and amateur) seeing that cause them to complain about Starlink's satellites? They are often visible in the night sky as they deploy; what keeps them up there? What keeps the moon up there? And have any FE explorers journeyed to the edge of the world and attempted to climb down? Have they even asserted where the edge is? I think these last two are really the most important questions to me.

[allynh]

Come now, why spoil the fun with Reality.

Let's keep the thrust of the thread as Story so that we can play with the concept.

That's not to say that your questions aren't solid. They are useful for Story as well. After all, we have to have a villain doubting the facts of being on a flat Earth. After all, Story is conflict.

There are so many great stories where someone climbs to the edge and transcends Reality to discover wonder.

The last part of Strata by Terry Pratchett blows my mind each time I read it.

Here's something similar from long ago, when there was still wonder in the world.

The Abominable Snowman Of The Himalayas (1957) Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUcMsy96sps

When he sees the creature, it looks into his soul, and he is utterly changed.

The Abominable Snowman 1957 -''Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti Mind Speak''
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNCYiDBdcmw

I can see a number of stories just like that, that need to be written.

Besides, like I said, your questions are intriguing.

Instead of asking, "Cui bono?" ask "Who is paying for the cover up? and how do they benefit." Or, who is paying for people to believe in Flat Earth, and how do they benefit by disrupting Science like that. Or,...

See, once you start asking, it's Turtles all the way down, and that's where the Story starts.

Of course, if at any point the thread devolves into blatant Conspiracy Theory then the Moderators will lock it, but at least we will have a thread that everyone can point to and say that we tried.

Thanks...

[jackokie]

@allynh Well, I've put my inner Sgt. Friday in lockup, and will pose an answer to one of my questions: What keeps the satellites and moon up there? It must be that gravity works both ways, having an attractive force at or very close to the Earth's surface, and a repulsive force higher up. So rockets only need enough propellant to boost through the transition zone up to where the repulsive force overcomes the rocket's mass. That's why they continue to accelerate.

Now how to account for the Sun rising in the East and setting in the West. Also if we fly East from New York to Japan, how is it we can then continue on in an Easterly direction until we get to San Francisco? Hmmm.

[allynh]

Technical questions like that are conveniently located on the Wiki page.

Modern flat Earth beliefs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_beliefs

Effects of and empirical evidence for spherical shape

The roughly spherical shape of Earth can be confirmed by many different types of observation from ground level, aircraft, and spacecraft. The shape causes a number of phenomena that a flat Earth would not. Some of these phenomena and observations would be possible on other shapes, such as a curved disk or torus, but no other shape would explain all of them.

Then there is a fun comment from the Flat Earth page discussing the "conspiracy theory" aspect of:

Modern flat-Earthers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Eart ... t-Earthers

To maintain belief in the face of overwhelming contrary, publicly available empirical evidence accumulated in the Space Age, modern flat-Earthers must generally embrace some form of conspiracy theory out of the necessity of explaining why major institutions such as governments, media outlets, schools, scientists, and airlines all assert that the world is a sphere. They tend to not trust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust or disagree with each other.[134]

Right or wrong, we don't want to get embroiled in the various "conspiracy theories", unless it's an effective plot point in Story.

Then as example, this is a scene from Gods of Egypt. Ra is towing the Sun around the flat Egypt.

The Chariot of RA (4K) Gods of Egypt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3INF-6jq_Q

In Terry Pratchett's novel he describes the artificial system supporting his Flat Earth.

Strata (novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)

When the expedition arrives at Jalo’s pre-programmed coordinates, they find a flattened version of the medieval Eastern hemisphere of the Earth they had originally departed from, before their disturbing rendezvous with Jalo. Clearly artificial, the disc rotates around its hub, and is contained inside a gigantic hollow sphere with tiny artificial “stars” affixed to the interior, augmented with a small meandering artificial sun, moon, and fake planets revolving around it.

Their ship is hit by one of the “planets” wandering on the interior of the sphere, so Kin, Marco, and Silver are forced to abandon ship. They land on the flat planet with the help of their “lift-belt” equipped suits, while their ship crashes. A return from the flat world now seems impossible, but hoping for assistance from the disc’s mysterious builders, Kin, Marco, and Silver set off towards a structure they had spotted at the disc’s hub. It is the only thing on the flat “Earth” which does not match the geography of the spherical Earth they left.

Remember, the Flat Earth model was "superseded" by the Geocentric model which supported all of the observations. Which was simply "superseded" by "modern" observations.

Geocentric model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model

Two observations supported the idea that Earth was the center of the Universe:

First, from anywhere on Earth, the Sun appears to revolve around Earth once per day. While the Moon and the planets have their own motions, they also appear to revolve around Earth about once per day. The stars appeared to be fixed on a celestial sphere rotating once each day about an axis through the geographic poles of Earth.[2]

Second, Earth seems to be unmoving from the perspective of an earthbound observer; it feels solid, stable, and stationary.

We can't be so arrogant in believing that "modern" observations won't be "superseded" by a different model. That's what happens in my stuff. It comes as quite a shock to most people, as you can well imagine.

This discussion has been great for my Story folders.

Thanks...

[BuckeyeFrank]

Thanks for the teaching skills, to keep this thread open and productive.

by allynh Let's keep the thrust of the thread as Story so that we can play with the concept.

In a flat earth alternate reality, things accepted as fact in a globe reality, need to be set aside. Perhaps space flight is only advanced to the X 15 rocket planes and we could even use actual flat and eye level horizon video images at peak altitude flights to give a greater sense of story reality.

GaryN' & EU in general, has plenty of posts pointing out the star distance errors and the question as to the actual internal function of stars. So this leaves a chink in the armor to slip through saying the nature of space is largely unknown. In FE the story reality, maybe space isn't assumed to be vast, but a discrete layer. the nature of gravity, we could use W Thorton's electro gravity.
The cool thing about not pointing out actual physical limits to this flat biosphere reality is there could be many others beyond the Antarctic Ice wall. Hince all sorts of narratives are possible. So for a FE fiction to be satisfactory for this consumer, it would need to encompass these ideas.

[allynh]

Just finished reading Lord of the Rings(LOTR) again, and remembered that Middle-Earth used to be part of a Flat Earth.

Everything was created as a flat world, and Middle-Earth was spun off as a round world, yet at the end of the story Bilbo and Frodo took a ship from the Gray Havens and sailed West to the flat world that still exists.

I can't remember the title, but there was a short story in one of the Writers of the Future books, where Columbus did sail off the edge of the world. They found themselves in free fall as the Earth curled up to go from flat to round. That the people on the ship "observing" events caused the "rounding" of the world.

This is like the classic painting by Miracle, "I Told You So"
https://www.miraclesart.com/product-page/i-told-you-so

I have a poster of that painting, framed. In the poster you have two of the ships about to go over. At the bottom of the poster you can see a flag on the tail of the first ship that already went over the edge. What inspires Story is the little boat escaping has an outboard motor on it, so clearly the fleet was a reenactment, with modern motors on the emergency craft, and they "triggered" the "edge" to appear.

This is like the classic "Vile Vortices" that I remembered reading in some magazine in the 1970s.

Vile vortices[edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_T._S ... e_vortices

Sanderson has been described as credulous for suggesting that aircraft and boats went missing at Devil's Sea because of a wrinkle in spacetime, gravitational or magnetic aberrations, extra-terrestrials or mysterious underwater people.[5] Larry Kusche, who traced the Devil's sea stories to their original sources, found that the phenomena of Devil's Sea had been fabricated and was nothing more than an exaggeration based on the loss of several fishing boats over a period of five years.[5]

In 1968, Sanderson introduced the concept of the "vile vortex". Vile vortices are supposed to be "anomalic regions" regularly distributed on Earth where disproportionately many strange phenomena occur, such as disappearances, UFO sightings, or poltergeist activity. The first and second "vile vortex" were the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea. Larry Kusche analyzed the data underlying that idea and found it insufficient.[6]

Here are two articles that touch on the concept with the map and globe that I remember.

The Vile Vortices Of Ivan T. Sanderson
https://historydaily.org/the-vile-vorti ... -sanderson

10 Vile Vortices around the world
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mapa ... rra_11.htm

For Story, I see that both the round Earth and the Flat Earth occur just as in LOTR. That depending on events, you can "trigger" the "edge" to appear. That could be why ships vanish in the Bermuda Triangle.

This literally opens so many possible stories.

Thanks...

BTW, This variation makes far more sense than just the classic Flat Earth mentioned today. In fact, if we are not careful, this variation may end up being adopted by the "Flat Earth People" and we will be blamed for making it "mainstream".

[allynh]

Oops!

NASA Spacewalk EVA 64 | GoPro HD | Earth and the International Space Station
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cucrGpQmA

I'll have to figure out how to work this into Story.

[BuckeyeFrank]

Oops!

NASA Spacewalk EVA 64 | GoPro HD | Earth and the International Space Station
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cucrGpQmA

I'll have to figure out how to work this into Story.

Absolutely awesome cinema photography-like quality ...
But if we were to eliminate the GoPro lens distortion, my example of a particular segment;
https://youtu.be/74cucrGpQmA?t=664 ( Add pops up a few seconds before the Skip Ads button. but starts at the point of maximum distortion of curvature.

And use an astronaut photo of the Indian ocean, ( Using the storyline that NASA data and their interpretation represents reality)..
ISS Astronaut photo of Indian ocean..
https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages ... -57948.JPG
from https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/p ... rame=57948
Spacecraft Altitude: 192 nautical miles (356km)

The vanishing point of perspective could equally explain this minimum amount of curvature image. IMO
The usefulness being;
If you wanted to give a rationalization, to enhance reality, to a workable Flat Earth story world.