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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Day/Night Cycle and Centripetal Acceleration

« on: August 09, 2017, 08:44:37 PM »

Most FE'ers believe that eclipses are caused by the motion of a THIRD body (some call it "The Shadow Object" - other "The Anti-moon").   This object is black, possibly opaque, possibly a disk rather than a sphere.   It moves in front of the sun to cause solar eclipses and in front of the moon to cause lunar eclipses.

As usual, they are unable to accurately describe the motions of this object...or how it's utterly opaque to sunlight but somewhat translucent to moonlight...and utterly transparent to starlight and planet-light.

But that's how the majority hand-wave this problem away.

Some don't dispute that solar eclipses are caused by the moon.

All of them are unable to adequately explain why the path of totality during a solar eclipse is so narrow.

If the Sun is only 3000 miles away, the anti-moon would have to be MUCH closer...below the altitude that aircraft fly...or else the eclipse would be visible over most of the surface of the Earth...and it's CLEARLY not.

My primary question is where is the moon during the solar eclipse if it's a third body? That of course would also complicate the celestial mechanics.

2

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Solar Irradiance

« on: August 09, 2017, 08:25:50 PM »

I find that the simplest arguments are the best.

For getting FE'ers to reconsider their positions?

Instead, they'll simply accuse RE'ers of faking evidence, "photoshopping" pictures, etc, etc.

So we're left with evidence that can be extracted by other means.

Which is why I like more abstract phenomenon like this example of blackbody radiation. Science isn't just about what we can personally observe. There's also phenomenon that we need technology to quantify.

The first FE'er I encountered was on Facebook and the argument that ended up being effective was about radio communication. It didn't necessarily change his mind but he admitted he didn't know how to answer it and the conversation ended there. My question was why it wasn't possible to have a conversation with anyone at anytime on a flat Earth by simply going to a tall place with a HAM? Why do tricks like relays or bouncing off the ionosphere at ideal times have to be used on a flat Earth?

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Flat Earth Theory / The Day/Night Cycle and Centripetal Acceleration

« on: August 07, 2017, 12:53:05 AM »

The day/night cycle on the wiki has the sun and the moon revolving around the midpoint between them. This would make sense in the context of "celestial gravitation" where they both pull on each other. However, this clearly can't be temporally universal as the solar eclipse later this month will demonstrate. If the day/night cycle as outlined on the wiki is to continue, the sun must continue to travel in a circular manner. From whence would the centripetal acceleration of the sun come from during a solar eclipse on a flat earth?

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Solar Irradiance

« on: August 06, 2017, 10:48:01 PM »

To avoid a wall of text, I'm going to provide just enough background information to frame my question about the FE model. Should the details of how I got the following numbers be desired, just let me know.

Avoiding a wall of text might be a good idea.  I created just such a wall of text on this very topic last year and nobody responded to it.

In an ideal world, it might be a good idea but so far it's still crickets. I imagine it probably has more to do with a lack of background than anything. It's not as easy to come up with an ad hoc explanation against something you don't understand.

I'm sure a plausible model could be proposed, but it would require a sun with complicated geometries and maybe one that can't reasonably be modeled as a blackbody radiator. In either case, someone like Bishop could justify it with some asinine argument about astronomers not being scientists. No such argument could be used against the inverse square law though. That is verifiable with electromagnetic radiation here on Earth and is derivable from first principles. Even if one were to assume exotic non-blackbody matter, the inverse square law would complicate things for the geometry and distance of the sun.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Solar Irradiance

« on: August 04, 2017, 05:01:14 AM »

How does the FE model account for this?

It doesn't.

That was my suspicion, but I think my thoughts go without saying. I'm just wondering if the proposals will be mostly that the data is a conspiracy or that the sun isn't a spherical blackbody radiator.

6

Flat Earth Theory / Solar Irradiance

« on: August 04, 2017, 02:01:14 AM »

To avoid a wall of text, I'm going to provide just enough background information to frame my question about the FE model. Should the details of how I got the following numbers be desired, just let me know.

In the RE model, the Sun is a blackbody radiator 1.496×10^8 km from earth with a surface temperature of about 5770K and a radius of 695,700 km. It's Luminosity is about 3.828×10^26 Watts. The irradiance at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is about 1363 W/m^2.

Using FE's distance to the sun of 3000 miles (4828 km) and the Sun's known angular size of about 0.5°, it has a radius of about 22.45 km. Using this, the Stefan-Boltzman law, and the 4828 km, the FE model has the same irradiance when the sun is overhead (1363 W/m^2).

However, the irradiance varies considerably when not overhead. For example, say the sun is overhead in Miami around noon, and it's around 9am in Las Angeles 3763 km away. Assume clear skies in both cities. At that distance, line of site distance from LA to the sun is about 6121 km. Because radiation drops as an inverse square of the distance, normal incident irradiance in a vacuum at LA would be about 847.9 W/m^2. But in reality there is still an atmosphere, and the radiation has to travel through even more of it. Assuming the same ratio of atmospheric loss though (1000/1363), the ballpark number would be around 622 W/m^2.

Irradiance does not vary this much in reality. Take for example data from normal incident pyrheliometers in Albuquerque, New Mexico on a clear day. The direct irradiance at 9am does not drop much lower than 1000 W/m^2 at noon (last figure on the website):
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter02/chapter02.html

How does the FE model account for this?