141

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: May 15, 2018, 12:47:52 PM »

Yes, it is not irrational to discuss laws of physics, it is not even irrational not to believe in them. Even in our modern world average people have no need to know much more about physics than people in the dark middle ages to survey in their daily life.

It starts to be irrational if you approach the area of pure denial and conspiracy theory. The question of the shape of the earth was finally solved unquestionable when it was the first time directly observed from space to be indeed a globe. Such an observation is an ultimate proof. If you want to believe after that in a flat earth you have no other choice than calling this observation fake. And you only can call this fake, if you call everything related to this observation also fake. And then you are directly into a conspiracy theory. And usually you cannot present any valid proof for this conspiracy, so you are left with pure denial. And in the light of all the consequences this conspiracy theory has (number of people involved, international collaboration, non-existence of everyday used technology, etc.) , I would call this irrational.     

142

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Any flaw and any ignorance of Academic Science is the fuel for Flat Earth Model

« on: May 15, 2018, 12:04:07 PM »

That's an irrelevant question, cause I don't know any reviewers from that places...

143

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Horizon is Always at Eye Level

« on: May 15, 2018, 11:28:21 AM »

If you refuse to understand their claims, you cannot disprove them. What you are doing is to show that the extrapolation of the parallel lines in your pictures are meeting at one point above the apparent horizon due to perspective. But that is nothing any flat earth believer is denying.

What are the flat-earth believers denying, then?

But no flat earth believer claimed that, they simply don't know.

They 'don't know'? But what claim are they making, if they don't know?

So, you can make your fancy device as sophisticated as you like, it will not be accepted as disprove, because it does not target the fundamental question.   

What IS the 'fundamental question', then?

The fundamental question is, if you could linearly extrapolate from your position to infinity. Because that is what you are doing here. You take some apparatus, you align it, take a picture and the you draw some straight lines into the picture. This is a linear extrapolation over a very great distance.

The flat earth guys say, we don't know if we can do this extrapolation. We are looking onto this from the other side. We put the vanishing point at some fixed distance and then what they call perspective lines goes away under a fixed angle from this point. And if this leads to some contradictions from what you observe from your point of view then reason for this might be, that the assumption of linear extrapolation is not valid of large distances. That's what they mean if they talk about limits of Euclidean geometry and discontinuities.

What you have to do now, is to proof that this linear extrapolation is justified and valid. Because otherwise you cannot proof that there is a contradiction between your experiments and their understanding of perspective, vanishing point, horizon, etc. 

And that's in principle the same for all physical explanations of astronomical observations. They all assume that the laws of physics are same at every point in space. Of course there is no indication and reason to not believe this, but in the end this cannot be proved.     

144

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Horizon is Always at Eye Level

« on: May 15, 2018, 08:00:25 AM »

But you have to understand it, if you want to understand why they don't believe in your argumentation or your experiments…

I don't think I do. The objective is to simply verify or refute the claim that "the horizon is always at eye-level." 

I would love to understand the explanation for why that would be so on a flat surface earth, but it's not necessary that I do in order to test the claim.

Now, if I demonstrate that the horizon is NOT always at eye-level, any dispute will have to come from test set up or the method with which I attempt to observe it. But such issues have nothing to do with understanding why the horizon is always at eye-level. 

If it can be shown that the horizon drops below level as elevation increases, then that doesn't mean it'll refute a flat earth. It will just refute the horizon claim. Flat earth proponents will have to theorize another explanation for why the horizon appears as it does.

On a convex curved surface, the horizon will drop from level.
How it appears on a flat surface? I'm interested, but that's not my concern in this effort. I just want to see if it drops or not.

If there are problems with setup or method, I've invited feedback numerous times. I feel confident I'm being more careful, meticulous and guarded against obtaining a preferred outcome than was Samuel Rowbotham, but if there's a technique or method he used to verify the horizon was always at eye-level that I am missing, I encourage anyone to speak up and allow me the opportunity to include it.

If you refuse to understand their claims, you cannot disprove them. What you are doing is to show that the extrapolation of the parallel lines in your pictures are meeting at one point above the apparent horizon due to perspective. But that is nothing any flat earth believer is denying. What you have to proof is, that the extrapolation as such is valid. That's something very, very different. As I explained above, anything regarding perspective of objects at or near the horizon is constructed from the vanishing point back towards you in the context of so-called flat-earth theory.

You may reply, that this should be equivalent. Yes, but only if the extrapolation is linear. But no flat earth believer claimed that, they simply don't know. So, you can make your fancy device as sophisticated as you like, it will not be accepted as disprove, because it does not target the fundamental question.   

145

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Horizon is Always at Eye Level

« on: May 14, 2018, 04:33:31 PM »

This is all very nice and demonstrates very well how perspective works in the real world, but I guess that will not impress any EnaG believer. If you look it up, they construct "perspective lines" in a very different way. First they place the vanishing point, which is given by a right-angled triangle, where the hypotenuse is the direct line between your eyes and the vanishing point. One cathetus is down from your eyes to sea level, the other one going from there to the vanishing point. The angle at the vanishing point is fixed, therefore the vanishing point is moving away if you go higher.

Everything behind this vanishing point you can't see, everything in front adopts in size so that it fits into the triangle. The angle is defined by the optical resolution of your eyes. Therefore, if you take a telescope, the angle changes and the vanishing point is moving further away, which leads to the recovery effect.

That's a kind of far-field perspective, where the Euclidean geometry is no longer valid. You demonstrate near-field perspective, which goes along with Euclidean geometry. To disprove this concept, you would need a device that goes from you to the horizon. But that's not possible. And something like railway tracks does not help, because that's give you no conclusive result. Because they are to narrow and apparently melt into a single point at the horizon and if you climb up, the horizon will indeed move away while the tracks apparently still melt into one point at the horizon.

It's a debate you can not win, because for every proof you show, they will demand another one that will set the level for you even higher...         

I see that someone here has actually read Earth Not a Globe.

Well, I have too -- both editions. Can't say I understand the flat earth explanation for horizon, but for this effort, all that matters is whether or not the horizon is level with the eye, regardless of why or why not.

But you have to understand it, if you want to understand why they don't believe in your argumentation or your experiments. It does't help that you climb mountains with your apparatus and make nice pictures and draw some lines to show something they do not deny. To convince them, you have to show that all the lines you draw are representing the real behavior up to what they call the vanishing point. Good luck with that... 

146

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Any flaw and any ignorance of Academic Science is the fuel for Flat Earth Model

« on: May 14, 2018, 04:16:58 PM »

In most cases of rejection the decision over a manuscript makes only one person: an editor. He might get it all wrong, correct? It is not objective decision. I guess, even Newton was not immidiately accepted: his book "Principia" waited many long years in the library for its first reader.

The editor makes first of all the decision to send your paper for peer review or not. This is based on some formal criteria (does the paper fit to the journal content first of all) and of course also on a rough scientific judgement. The main decision is made by the peer reviewers. They have criteria like novelty of the presented results, scientific value and correctness. If all of them agree to publish, the editor usually accepted their judgment. Anyway, if the their judgement is not to bad, you have a chance to reply to the criticism and demand a second review. You even have the right to reject certain reviewers in advance. It's a tough process. I know it from both sides.       

147

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: May 14, 2018, 04:01:43 PM »

I think this is a matter of perspective. If look out of your window and everything you see looks flat it is somehow irrational to think in reality everything is not flat. If you stick with this, the flatness of the earth is self-evident. Imagine you would be alone, without the ability to travel over large distance, it needs quite some effort for someone like that to find out by himself that the earth is not flat. Almost no one in the world would take the efforts to find out by himself. And most of the people anyway don't care what is the shape of the world.
 

148

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Are other objects in the Solar System Flat as well?

« on: May 09, 2018, 08:45:15 AM »

The reliability of an expert relies on his qualification. And the level to be a scientist is very high. E.g. studying physics is not like learning a foreign language, where you just memorize the new vocabulary and grammar. Studying physics means that you went through all the theories by yourself. You reproduce the proofs, you apply them in different situations, you repeat experiments by yourself and interpret the results. Given the hundred thousands of physics students world-wide every day some important experiment is done again by some, one import law is derived again, again and again. You can not be a scientist by just repeating what someone else said. That's not how it works...   

149

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Horizon is Always at Eye Level

« on: May 09, 2018, 07:03:56 AM »

This is all very nice and demonstrates very well how perspective works in the real world, but I guess that will not impress any EnaG believer. If you look it up, they construct "perspective lines" in a very different way. First they place the vanishing point, which is given by a right-angled triangle, where the hypotenuse is the direct line between your eyes and the vanishing point. One cathetus is down from your eyes to sea level, the other one going from there to the vanishing point. The angle at the vanishing point is fixed, therefore the vanishing point is moving away if you go higher.

Everything behind this vanishing point you can't see, everything in front adopts in size so that it fits into the triangle. The angle is defined by the optical resolution of your eyes. Therefore, if you take a telescope, the angle changes and the vanishing point is moving further away, which leads to the recovery effect.

That's a kind of far-field perspective, where the Euclidean geometry is no longer valid. You demonstrate near-field perspective, which goes along with Euclidean geometry. To disprove this concept, you would need a device that goes from you to the horizon. But that's not possible. And something like railway tracks does not help, because that's give you no conclusive result. Because they are to narrow and apparently melt into a single point at the horizon and if you climb up, the horizon will indeed move away while the tracks apparently still melt into one point at the horizon.

It's a debate you can not win, because for every proof you show, they will demand another one that will set the level for you even higher...         

150

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Foucault Pendulum

« on: May 08, 2018, 11:52:25 AM »

Of course you can introduce this ominous celestial gravitation as something that just by definition acts in way that it fits to all observations. The question is only how far you can go with this attempt? If you read through the explanations of this celestial gravitation it seems to be a quite selective force. It always jumps in if with the denial of ordinary gravitation you approach some problem. On A it acts in that way, while on B it acts not or differently from A.

But that's not the way how the modern way of mechanical theory works. We do not have a law for the precision of the earth and another one for the precision of toy gyroscope kids are playing with. We only have one law for the spinning of mass. And these laws are universal also in a much broader sense. They are the same at any time, at any place and in any direction, and invariant upon scaling, you make no assumption about that during their derivation. I can only encourage everyone to read through a book on mechanical theory to see how to derive so very different things as the Kepler laws, the Euler equations or the equations that describe the motion of a pendulum in a very coherent way from the same starting point.   

Compared to this all this flat earth stuff is a patchwork of ideas, sometime obviously even contradicting each other.



 

151

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Testable difference between FE and RE

« on: May 08, 2018, 11:27:11 AM »

Isn't the shape of the earth on the first hand not a mapping problem (if we forget for a moment that one can simply observer the shape from space...) ? A job for geographer and cartographer? You measure distances of different places and try to build a map out of this. And find that the only possible solution is a globe. That's the way it worked for centuries. And only after that, you can ask how do all the other observation fit into this picture. Not the other way round. 

152

Flat Earth Community / Re: Flat Earth UK Convention

« on: May 07, 2018, 08:18:30 AM »

Just to put these numbers in relation to the interest in real science. At our four spring meetings (each covering different areas) of our national physical society we had more than 10000 attendees with almost everyone giving either a oral or poster presentation. In my home country the number of students who started to study physics roughly tripled over the last 20 years. I assume this is not much different in other countries. Regarding the number of applications we get from countries like China, Korea, India or countries from the Middle East, I guess the increase there is even much, much higher. I also assume similar numbers from other areas of science, engineering and technology.

On the other hand, there seems to be indeed a growing interest in different kinds of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and extreme political orientations. But I guess this is mainly an effect of the internet, which allows for a higher grade of attention, exchange and organization. You no longer feel alone with you weird ideas.

It is also a win for the classical media to pick up a story like the one of this self-made rocket man compared to going through the thousands of real scientific results published every week and make a compelling story out of it. That's a hard job compared to the few clicks you will maybe generate with this. But it enhances the impression there is something really going on in the field of pseudoscience, especially for their believers...           

153

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Proof of Flat Earth model within Legal Science

« on: May 04, 2018, 02:32:41 PM »

You should spend any effort in this discussion. This tried it already on ResearchGate and got the only answer scientific community can give to this ideas: Silence...

154

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Proof of Flat Earth model within Legal Science

« on: May 04, 2018, 11:02:55 AM »

Your last regular paper is from 2006, the others are from 2001-2003. Everything after that is going more and more into the direction of complete nonsense. I'm not rude, whatever reputation you once had, you destroyed it by yourself...   

155

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Proof of Flat Earth model within Legal Science

« on: May 04, 2018, 10:28:42 AM »

Believe me, I know some real Russian scientists. Also they would never let your pseudoscience go through a peer review...  And I really admire the great physicist from Russia or the former Soviet Union. In almost all of our projects we make use of the work of great people like Landau (one of the brightest physicist of the last century), Lifschitz, Ginsburg, Dzyaloshinskii, Astrov, and so on and so on. But what you are "publishing" is just nonsense, Russian or not... 

156

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Proof of Flat Earth model within Legal Science

« on: May 04, 2018, 08:58:28 AM »

I looked through your ResearcheGate profile. Nothing of the stuff you and your friends uploaded there has any chance to be published in a regular journal. Go back to university a try again to understand the stuff they tried to teach you the first time. 

157

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Proof of Flat Earth model within Legal Science

« on: May 04, 2018, 08:34:31 AM »

Looks like some failed scientist are trying to misuse ResearchGate to spread their weird ideas... 

158

Flat Earth Theory / Re: No sun

« on: April 28, 2018, 04:40:21 PM »

Still don't get what RET should be... That the Earth is a globe is an observation, not a physical theory. It's nothing you can study at any university, there are no books about it, etc. Just exists in the mind of flat Earth believers...

159

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Possible Issue with Solar Noon in Round Earth Theory

« on: April 27, 2018, 03:13:07 PM »

I think this guy is really sure that he found a big hole in the whole calendar system, overlooked by generations of astronomers for hundreds, even thousands of years. At that it needs a smart ass guy as this flat earther to show it to the world. That's the real flat earth spirit :-)

160

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: NASA Live Stream

« on: April 26, 2018, 04:15:16 PM »

According to google the average interest in "flat earth" around the world in the last 12 month was 46%, with a peak last November of 100%. The interest for the corresponding expressions in Russian, German and Spanish at the same time was 2%, 1% and 1%, respectively. The Russian expression is declining in the recent month after two huge peaks last year, the German one is more or less constant and the Spanish one slightly increasing.

And regarding Indonesia... There was zero interest before July 2016, than it jumped to 100% followed by a exponential decay down to 14% now. And regarding the US, it is interesting to see, that it's not the states where the brightest heads are living show the most interest in this...