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Offline RonJ

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #20 on: January 12, 2019, 04:42:39 PM »
Anyone who believes that the Suez Canal can only happen on a flat earth doesn't really understand the way water really works.  I've actually been thru the Suez canal countless times, in both directions.  I always observe sea level on both sides.  What is meant by sea level is just the distance between the surface of the ocean and the center of the spherical earth.  As long as that distance is identical at each point along the canal, no water will flow. 

It seems that the flat earth people are always is confused with exactly what 'down hill' really means. Where water is concerned, 'down hill' means a lessening of the distance between any drop of water and the center of the earth.  As long as that 'center distance' is the same at all points no water will flow. 

I did go to school and I did learn a trade.  We learned about pumps, pipes, nozzles, and lots of other interesting stuff.  There were also some lessons about the properties of water.  In one of those lessons I learned that water will always flow in the direction of the net force vector.  You can have water sit nice and flat and not flow on the surface of a spherical earth as long as the distance between the water's surface and the center of the earth is the same at all points along the way. 

If you want to do a Zetetic experiment look at the elevation of the head of any river, like the Mississippi River, and the elevation at the mouth.  You will always find that the distance between the start of the river and the center of the earth is a bit longer than at the end of the river.  Water in the river will ALWAYS flow to a spot closer to the center of the earth as long as there are no other external forces involved, like hurricanes, or tides. 

If you don't believe that, then just cite an example where water flows in some other direction than the net applied force vector.  If you can't find a valid example, then you have to believe that the earth really could be spherical even after observing what is happening on the Suez Canal.
You can lead flat earthers to the curve but you can't make them think!

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #21 on: January 12, 2019, 06:35:06 PM »
No one is seeing any curvature because it doesn't exist. Lets present the History Channel facts when building the Suez Canal. 120 miles long connecting to different seas with no difference in elevation at opposing ends. In a fake curved earth there should be a 9,600 ft. drop at one sea entrance. That's OVER 1.8 miles of curve. Not there folks, wasn't built for curvature and as History Channel explains "The surveyors’ faulty calculations were enough to scare Napoleon away from the project, and plans for a canal stalled until 1847, when a team of researchers finally confirmed that there was no serious difference in altitude between the Mediterranean and Red Seas."

So please stop the madness, you've been programmed.

https://www.history.com/news/9-fascinating-facts-about-the-suez-canal

OK, try this experiment at home. Take a basketball and a sugar cube and a ruler. Place the sugar cube on top of the basketball. Measure the elevation (height) of the sugar cube - about 1cm correct? Now place the sugar cube on the side of the basketball. Measure its elevation - about 1cm right? Or is your definition of elevation somehow different or perhaps your sugar cube mysteriously grows when you move it.

As a licensed builder you might want to take that stupid idea once step further. Since we are talking about building a 120 mile long canal based on a datum line.

NOW take a string of dental floss and stretch it tightly from the two sugary cubes. Bummer fricking basketball in the way to get a straight plum line. Learn to read the article, learn a trade, something as simple as masonry where string lines are mandatory with levels.

Absolutely agree, the basketball is getting in the way. Let's scale that up, so try stretching 10,000km of dental floss between two tall towers and you are going to find the fricking earth getting in the way too.

Your argument is that one part of the canal is 9,600 ft lower than the other. But which end is it then? The question is meaningless on a globe - take a picture of a basketball against a plain background and tell me where the top is. Depends entirely on the orientation of the camera. A sphere on its own without reference to something doesn't have a top or a bottom so there is no lower or higher either. Sure, through an accident of history, if you buy a standard globe and put it on a desk, the northern hemisphere is "above" the southern with respect to the desk, but buy a dual axis globe and you can turn it around to put Australia on top if you like. Just as valid.

So take your dual axis globe, turn it around so the Western end of the canal is on top and the Eastern end is "lower" (simply meaning nearer the desk), now adjust it so the Eastern end of the canal is at the top. Hey presto the Western end is "lower". Both perfectly valid viewpoints, but meaningless since there is no external reference point to determine which hemisphere is up and which is down.

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Offline RonJ

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #22 on: January 14, 2019, 04:35:39 AM »
I saw a nice program on the Apollo 8 mission.  The idea was to navigate to the moon, orbit and come back without landing.  In order to navigate a sextant was installed so the earth & a navigational star could be observed and the spacecraft could be properly positioned along the route.  The black & white image on the lower right shows a nice view of the earth.  Even if the lens was dubbed as a 'fish eye' it wouldn't matter.  You can see the whole globe.
 
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24619/was-the-apollo-sextant-used-or-tested-to-determine-position-while-in-earth-orb

I believe that the whole series of photographs of the periscope view is available on PeriscopeFile.com

Is this another example of the NASA lies?  If that's not the case then you will have to disbelieve your eyes as the pictures clearly show the form of the earth.
 
« Last Edit: January 14, 2019, 07:22:24 AM by RonJ »
You can lead flat earthers to the curve but you can't make them think!

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Offline Bad Puppy

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #23 on: January 14, 2019, 07:39:38 PM »
The earth is observably flat by default.

No. Objects don't have a default shape, smell, colour, or anything.  The an observer of an object will define its properties through observation, measurement, or other means of identification.  If any properties an object are later learned to be incorrect, usually due to advances in science, then those properties are redefined.

Like, the earth was observed to be flat.  Then we went to space and saw that it's not flat, and instead is actually an oblate spheroid.
Quote from: Tom Bishop
...circles do not exist and pi is not 3.14159...

Quote from: totallackey
Do you have any evidence of reality?

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Offline RonJ

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #24 on: January 14, 2019, 08:03:33 PM »
I agree that it is difficult to actually see the earth's curvature by looking at the horizon.  The 'sinking ship' effect seems to be somewhat controversial on this site.  Why not just short circuit that whole argument and look at something in the sky, the North Star for example?

https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=9797.msg175959#msg175959

When you look at this post you will see that the mathematics just won't work out unless the earth is spherical.  This is a direct observation of the curvature of the earth by observing something above the earth and not on the earth. 
You can lead flat earthers to the curve but you can't make them think!

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Offline AATW

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #25 on: January 14, 2019, 09:47:26 PM »
Like, the earth was observed to be flat.  Then we went to space and saw that it's not flat, and instead is actually an oblate spheroid.
We'd actually, as a species, long since worked that out.
But yes, since the late 1940's when we've had rocket technology we have been able to confirm it with observations were there any lingering doubt.
That should have killed the flat earth theories stone dead but in a fit of cognitive dissonance which psychologists could write entire books about they just declared every single photo and video from space from every country fake.
Tom: "Claiming incredulity is a pretty bad argument. Calling it "insane" or "ridiculous" is not a good argument at all."

TFES Wiki Occam's Razor page, by Tom: "What's the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter to an escape velocity of 7 miles per second"

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #26 on: January 16, 2019, 07:38:16 PM »
Any footage taken from an SR-71 or U-2, the thousands of pictures/video taken from space, that directTV channel that shows the planet we live on spinning, seeing the top of a ship on the horizon before the entirety of the ship, actually SEEING the curvature at sea. All evidence to the contrary of your theory. If you try to shoot something from a mile away, why does the bullet veer left or right in a predictable manner(depending on the direction you are facing when the bullet leaves the muzzle)?That’s the Coriolis effect, and any combat sniper can tell you it’s real. That’s just a start and anyone with common sense and a functioning brain would see that’s an awful lot of covering up by a lot of people(as I’m sure that will be your defense) to accomplish nothing more than proving your theory wrong.

Max_Almond

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #27 on: January 22, 2019, 10:53:00 AM »
You can see the curvature of the Earth directly in a number of ways. One would be to gain some altitude, such as in an aeroplane, as demonstrated in this photo from just over 46,000 feet:



Another method would be to climb a hill of at least 500 feet overlooking the sea, take a photo of a nice clear horizon, and then when you get home stretch it vertically. Straight lines stay straight, while curved lines are exaggerated, like this:



Vertically stretched/horizontally compressed, centred on horizon:



Note: when taking photos like this, great care must be taken to ensure that lens distortion is not creating or exaggerating the curve of the horizon. There are different ways this can be done.

Both of the above examples of 'directly seeing the Earth's curvature' can be checked against a mathematical model at walter.bislins.ch, as well as compared with what these views would look like on a flat earth.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2019, 06:39:36 AM by Max_Almond »

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #28 on: January 22, 2019, 01:29:20 PM »
The onus is with FE.  It is their responsibility to prove the earth is flat, not the other way around.  The reason is that mainstream scientific opinion-- a theory you must admit was successful in its own right-- was well established for centuries before the FE community dissented.  There is no "default assumption" about the shape of the earth; various indigenous cultures also assumed the earth was infinite, round, in the branches of a giant tree, hatched from an egg laid by a giant primordial bird, one world of many, sentient and good, sentient and evil, etc.  If you think the world is flat you must provide evidence toward that end; the globe-earthers already did that for their theory.  The FE community obviously thinks that evidence isn't very good, but objectively they have no analogous model which matches the predictive power and real-world fidelity of the globe earth theory.  GE theory is robust, ancient, and supported by copious evidence-- you can't just dismiss it out of hand.  Build a better theory and I'll listen.

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #29 on: January 22, 2019, 09:31:53 PM »
The earth is observably flat by default. The possibility of it being a big ball, or whatever you imagine it to be, needs to be proven. It simply doesn't matter if you scream "you can't see it because it's an illusion!!1"

The fact that when we look at the matter closer and we find contradicting observations into the distance which support sinking and non-sinking is pretty telling. The fact that we have seen multiple long term timelapse of the horizon which show that the light is constantly curving in the distance to make things appear to sink, and sometimes to unsink, is also telling. The fact that the famous sinking photos don't even match up with the stated curvature for the round earth, which we have looked at, is telling still.

There is no real evidence for the ball earth. Aristotile's proofs for a globe based on sinking ships and lunar eclipses are unsupportable.
It is proven every day by measured distances, the path of the sun and satellite operation.

It is strange that you choose to claim otherwise and have not performed any measurements, or so you say.

Offline iamcpc

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #30 on: January 22, 2019, 09:57:27 PM »
You can see the curvature of the Earth directly in a number of ways. One would be to gain some altitude, such as in an aeroplane, as demonstrated in this photo from just over 46,000 feet:

Here's one that i thought was curious:



I know there are a lot of doubts around NASA. What about the mythbusters?

Max_Almond

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #31 on: January 23, 2019, 08:48:44 AM »
I wish they'd used a better camera in this, instead of the all-distorting fish eye.

shootingstar

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #32 on: January 23, 2019, 11:13:44 AM »
Here's James May doing the same thing (lucky so and so...)


Max_Almond

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #33 on: January 23, 2019, 01:59:44 PM »
If you go to walter.bislins.ch you can find a simulated view of what the horizon would look like on either the flat earth or globe earth model and see which one matches what we see from a given elevation. Assuming a non-distorting camera, of course. :)

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Offline TomFoolery

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #34 on: February 11, 2019, 04:45:58 AM »
...
Another method would be to climb a hill of at least 500 feet overlooking the sea, take a photo of a nice clear horizon, and then when you get home stretch it vertically. Straight lines stay straight, while curved lines are exaggerated, like this:

Note: when taking photos like this, great care must be taken to ensure that barrel distortion is not creating or exaggerating the curve of the horizon. There are different ways this can be done.
pared with what these views would look like on a flat earth.

So about barrel distortion, it curves straight lines around the center of the picture.
So you'd want to take two photos - one with the horizon slightly above the center of the picture, and the other with it slightly below.

Stretch them both equally, and take note - if they both curve the same way, then it's curve of the horizon.
However, if one curves up and the other curves down, then you're mostly seeing barrel distortion.

In reality, even with a curved earth if such were the case, you would probably see a combination of curve plus barrel disortion, so the photo with the horizon above center would show more curve and the other would show less curve or straight, or a negative curve, but not as much of a curve as the above-center horizon photo.

That's what's tricky about gopro fighter jet flight videos - even the default lenses have some barrel distortion and you can see that the horizon bulges up if it's above center, and sags down (concave) when it's below center of picture. You'd have to freeze frame the video right when the horizon line was in center of the picture, and see if it showed curve at that point. But even then, many early gopros had rolling shutter which can create rolling wave patterns in the picture so even if you saw a curve in the center of the picture it could be from the vibration of the jet and the rolling shutter.

What you'd really want to do is go up to a high point, and stretch a thin black string super tight between two trees. Maybe tie a couple helium balloons to it for good measure so it can't sag down.
Then step back move your camera so the string lines up with the horizon, and take a picture. That way you're comparing the horizon to a known straight line before it enters the camera's optics and gets distorted. That way, if the optics curves the horizon, it'll also curve the string equally.

If that showed a curve, ok now you'd have my attention. Just make sure the string is super tight, because if it sags down it'll make the earth look like it's curved up.
That's why the helium balloons to guarantee that if the string is curved at all, it's up. Then if the earth curves above that,  we know we got something. But don't worry, nobody's tried this yet. When they do, we can see that it's as flat as a pancake. Flatter, actually. I plan to try it myself when the snow melts in the mountains.

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Offline TomFoolery

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #35 on: February 11, 2019, 04:52:20 AM »
The earth is observably flat by default. The possibility of it being a big ball, or whatever you imagine it to be, needs to be proven. It simply doesn't matter if you scream "you can't see it because it's an illusion!!1"

The fact that when we look at the matter closer and we find contradicting observations into the distance which support sinking and non-sinking is pretty telling. The fact that we have seen multiple long term timelapse of the horizon which show that the light is constantly curving in the distance to make things appear to sink, and sometimes to unsink, is also telling. The fact that the famous sinking photos don't even match up with the stated curvature for the round earth, which we have looked at, is telling still.

There is no real evidence for the ball earth. Aristotile's proofs for a globe based on sinking ships and lunar eclipses are unsupportable.

Tom, Greetings.

What do you think about a theodolite? They seem really cool and people seem to mention them.
Could they be used to check the angular height of distant mountains, and confirm or deny a curve?

Basically it'd be a cinch. Just set up the theodolite and measure the angular height of a distant mountain of a known height and distance.
The theodolite gives you the angle above eyelevel in degrees, and you just feed that into tanget() and multiply that times the distance and that gives you the height.
Naturally you'd want to compensate for your observer elevation and perhaps for terrestrial atmospheric refraction which is supposed to be one degree for every 932 miles.

Would you consider this strong evidence either way?

Max_Almond

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #36 on: February 11, 2019, 06:09:14 AM »
So about barrel distortion, it curves straight lines around the center of the picture.

In reality, you would probably see a combination of curve plus barrel disortion, so the photo with the horizon above center would show more curve and the other would show less curve or straight, or a negative curve, but not as much of a curve as the above-center horizon photo.

One thing you can do is take a photo of a grid and analyse that. On my iPhone SE the lines about 109 pixels above and below the centre of the frame were straight, and the ones after that began to curve. That gives me a 218 pixel 'sweet spot', and the horizon occupies only about 10% of that.

Here's a compressed image of the grid:



And here's a picture of the horizon I took, with the mathematical prediction overlayed:



Next time I'm going to photograph the horizon with some straight metal bars placed just above and just below it, which I figure is the best demonstration that barrel distortion isn't causing the curve.

Cheers. :)

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Offline TomFoolery

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #37 on: February 11, 2019, 04:51:03 PM »
Next time I'm going to photograph the horizon with some straight metal bars placed just above and just below it, which I figure is the best demonstration that barrel distortion isn't causing the curve.

Cheers. :)

Ack, that flashing is annoying  ;D

But instead of using metal bars, how about a super tight string with a few helium balloons tied to it around the middle so we know it's not sagging down causing a false appearance of comparative curve?

Your metal bars might not be straight, or might be sagging under their own weight, causing a false appearance of upward earth curve.

Offline ChrisTP

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Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #38 on: February 11, 2019, 05:03:37 PM »
String with balloons attached may also make a string curve upward though. A solid metal that doesn't bend easy would be fine imo.
Tom is wrong most of the time. Hardly big news, don't you think?

Max_Almond

Re: Seeing the curvature of the Earth directly
« Reply #39 on: February 11, 2019, 05:11:15 PM »
It's probably easier to show that the metal bars are straight, since I've seen that the camera doesn't distort in the centre 7% and the bars aren't heavy enough to bend under their own weight.