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Messages - gnivrieiryk

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Do you remember when you first joined?
« on: October 31, 2019, 09:34:35 PM »
My name is Tom Bishop. I am an editor of the Flat Earth Wiki, which appears at the top result of Google searches when one enters in queries and questions related to Flat Earth.

I became involved in Flat Earth about 12 years ago in 2007 when I came across a link to the theflatearthsociety.org forum. There wasn't much content there. We knew that people had believed in a Flat Earth Theory in the past, but no one really knew how the model worked. I thought it was very absurd and amusing at first that anyone could possibly believe that the earth was flat.

I learned that Flat Earth Theory was mainly based on a book by Samuel Rowbtoham called "Earth Not a Globe," which purported to be an experimental inquiry into the shape of the world. While reading it, I couldn't help but to agree to myself "That's right! A cursory glance at science history has shown that there have been so many models and theories about nature, so what has really been demonstrated to be true?"

Next, my goal was to determine for myself what has and has not really been demonstrated to be true, using the philosophy of Earth Not a Globe as basis. It's not really a "Flat Earth" book. It's called Earth Not a Globe. A Flat Earth is Rowbotham's conclusion. The essential philosophy is that science must be demonstrated by first principles.

There were some physical questions on how certain phenomena could be possible in FET, but in my eyes that was really rather immaterial, as the alternative was an RE unemperical theory. An emperical theory is one which is demonstrated by experimentation and first principles. If you don't know where those first principles have been demonstrated, then you probably should not blindly believe it because a public school teacher told you to believe it.

When you first joined the forum, did you consider other websites/forums?

I first joined theflatearthsociety.org in 2007, but was unenthused that it was not a real society, and was mainly just a free-for-all forum and a certificate that you could order. There was some productive discussion in its early days, but that has mostly gone downhill.

In 2013, after an event where a month of forum postings were lost in a technical mishap, a group of us decided to create the Flat Earth Society at tfes.org to run things democratically. There is stricter moderation, and conversations are better here, quality wise. We do not have an issue with criticism against FE, but only ask that it is constructive criticism and that the posters have gone through the material for their initial questions. In my opinion, if a poster can't post something that is considered constructive, either for or against FET, that poster should be denied from posting with little tolerance.

Some see this tfes.org website as 'too strict', since casual comments that aren't point-of-fact are caught in the cross-fire, but it is actually the best compromise. Theflatearthsociety.org is too lenient, allowing non-contributive posters and trolls, while other website like Eric Dubey's IFERS forum simply do now allow dissenting opinion at all, and will consequently offer little progress to the Flat Earth Theory, with arguments only as strong as the individuals who make them, as opposed to it being a major community effort to debate an issue from all sides. The theory can ultimately only develop and grow through mass adversity.

Do you feel that an online forum like this is the best way to communicate ideas and discuss theories?

I feel that an online forum is the best way to discuss theories about the shape of the Earth if properly moderated. We haven't done it in a while, but I really like the mass debate. It helps to refine ideas. I appreciate that dozens of people are willing to devote hours of research to try and prove me wrong. It really saves us time and helps to find the right answer. In the wiki on tfes.org you can find the results of such debates and the FE conclusions decided on from the FE'ers who participated. As an editor I compile the Flat Earth view into various articles on different topics.

Every serious investigator who is truly interested in the subject will eventually take the initiative to compile his or her own collection of evidence. Both FE'ers and RE'ers will have their own areas and websites where they compile information and arguments. For someone who is dedicated to figuring it out, one must constantly argue against themselves, and question again and again. There is no such thing as 'truth' in science, only a collection of evidence which stands or falls on its strength.

What was the inciting incident that lead you to become a member of TFES?

For me, my decision to become a part of this basically comes in the from of, in my opinion, unsatisfactory evidence for the Round Earth model. This is supposed to be thousands of years of established science. We should have THE answers. Science is supposed to prove and demonstrate things to a near certainty, as is done in Chemistry and other empirical fields of laboratory research. When it comes to broader fields like Astronomy, however, things are so very uncertain and subject to interpretation. An astronomer can basically only observe and interpret, and is handicapped on what he or she can do experimentally.

As to the experiments which are claimed to exist, the Foucault Pendulum1, the Cavendish Experiment2, the Sinking Ship Effect3, Ring Laser Gyro4, etc, are all inconsistent effects which often give wrong or sometimes opposite results. It is as if an entire civilization of people had a paradigm that they needed to support and then proceeded to desperately search for things in nature that they could arguably suppose 'might be the case'. They based the foundations of their science upon it. It is nearly all based entirely on inconsistent evidence. As Samuel Birley Rowbotham said "That which is inconsistent proves nothing!" The journey in the debates and in building the Wiki has confirmed for me that science is wrong. Not just wrong, but entirely wrong. It is and based on weak interpretations and unchangeable paradigms... all based on what was likely an anti-establishment and agnostic philosophical outlook developed in 300 B.C. Once the few 'proofs' were developed the science became dogma and was handed down in the education system ever since.  It is all so weak that sometimes they have to invent inexplicable "celestial spheres" where straight lines become curved on a planetarium-like dome over our heads5. At other times they even have to change the nature of space and time itself to explain the results of experiments6.

It has been found that scientists are often frankly dishonest as well, on how they present science. For every "Cavendish Experiment" there are ten other tests in which have failed to find the universal attraction of mass, but go unmentioned. Sensitive experiments failed to detect the gravitation of the sun and moon7, hills8, and the continents and mountains9. Drop experiments at various altitudes have failed to show deviation from the Equivalence Principle10 which says that gravity operates as if the earth were accelerating upwards.

On the topic of the upward acceleration of the earth; if an object is being pushed or pulled through space, then that object is subject to the laws of inertia. Pushing a marble down the street is much easier than pushing a bowling ball. A bowling ball has more inertial resistance. Any body being pushed through space must exhibit inertial resistance. Yet bodies ignore this law and fall to earth at the same rate without a resistive effect. It is simply amazing that nature should be this way, that gravity operates as if the Earth were accelerating upwards without violation of the Equivalence Principle, even at atomic levels as measured by the most sensitive experiments11.
 
Our society's creed is to deduce that the earth accelerating upwards, simply because the empirical results of science experiments say that it is accelerating upwards. The Sun is in motion rather than the Earth simply because the empirical results of science experiments say so, with limited demonstration otherwise. The Earth is flat because experiments which account for refraction have measured it to be so12. All of this is in total agreement with what we experience of life.

Other factions of the Flat Earth movement have a more religious motivation, and therefore disregard any theory involving the motion of the earth, as they believe that the Bible says that the Earth is stationary; which is unfortunate since that is exactly how the Round Earth Theory operates. They know a truth and attempt to find evidence to support it. Whereas this website is more about assessing the physical evidence for the standard model (Round Earth Theory) more-so than anything else. There would ideally be more pure Flat Earth research, but that will come in time. The concept of a Flat Earth is presently more of a deductive conclusion from the assessment of current science knowledge rather than an active topic of research.

Appeals to NASA fall flat because we know that science knowledge doesn't come from one kind of organization funded by the government, or governments (assuming that it's not just one organization), of the world. Science occurs in the wider public community who establish facts through peer review and repetition. The government might have its own agenda on what they fund, who they contract, and what they show. Real science does not. Real science operates to disprove itself, is very public, and in the process comes to tenable conclusions (generally, so long as a philosophically unchangable paradigm is not involved). Since space research cannot be peer-reviewed by public academia, it is summarily considered as something that is non-science. It is closer to the science that a big business would pay for. And I wouldn't trust Marlboro and Camel to tell me about the health effects of smoking, even if those two organizations do agree with each other. After all, the US needs the earth to be round and orbital mechanics to exist as asserted in order to claim to have ICBMs that take advantage of the orbital properties to strike targets on the opposite site of the world.

Over the last ten years the physical theory of a Flat Earth has grown by leaps and bounds. The Round Earth theory is at a standstill, still referring to the Foucault Pendulum and ignoring all criticism. Round Earth science has stopped progressing long ago and will eventually fail. We know it's going to fail, because the mathematical model alleged to exist for it actually does not exist. The whole of astronomy is still based on epicycles13; a mathematical science of prediction notorious for a reputation as being the wrong way to do things. "Adding epicycles" is a scientific insult, yet that the state of astronomy at present. As a dynamical model of planetary orbits cannot exist due to the n-body problem which prevents non-symmetric systems from staying together, it is very interesting to think about how one can believe in something that mathematicians have essentially shown to be untenable, and how NASA is claiming to explore the Solar System on a mathematical system of epicycles. Sooner or later the ugly truth of astrophysics will be revealed to all.

In all the time spent researching for the Wiki, and in my own investigations, I have failed to find anything compelling that should cause one to conclude that astronomers are correct. What I did not find cannot be communicated in any article, and one must experience it for themselves. If something is supposed to be established and known, then we should expect to see compelling evidence demonstrating that to be the case, just as Chemistry tests its theories in many different exploratory ways for its conclusions. When you come across a science who can only refer you to few experiments of a few different types (which turn out to be inconsistent and questionable), rather than dozens of them, it should cause one to doubt. Quantum Theory has thousands of proofs, whereas there are only a few for 'gravity'.

Without funding we mainly rely on the vast investigation which science has already conducted to tell us that we live on a Flat Earth. We need only peer through the hypothesis' that have been made up to "explain" the undesirable results that they experience. Hopefully in the future the Flat Earth Theory can engage in its own fundamental research. Most people jump to the idea of direct exploration, but unless there is major funding that is impractical, relies on the trust of a few, will need certainty in the interpretation of the results, the interpretation of latitude and longitude and anything that impedes or accelerates travel such as weather. Exploration is even potentially impossible in some areas of the world due to strict regulations (Antarctica). But there are certain experiments that can be performed with funding that will contradict the standard model. In terms of the tenets of this society, I can predict that the 'weight variation by latitude' experiments will be contradicted when the experiments are properly done in a vacuum chamber and that time-lapse photography will continue to show that the sinking ship effect is inconsistent. As research topics I am also convinced that WGS84 and observations of the Moon hold the secret to the correct Flat Earth world models presently in consideration, as to whether there is one pole or there are, as is my preference, multiple poles.

Footnotes:

1. Foucault Pendulum is inconsistent. Much historic controversy in science on the cause and repeatability of the pendulum's motions. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Foucault_Pendulum

2. The Cavendish Experiment is inconsistent. Gravity changes in stength by over ten fold when tested at different times. Tainted by unkown effects. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Cavendish_Experiment

3. The Sinking Ship Effect is inconsistent. Sometimes the sinking effect occurs, at other times it does not occur. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Sinking_Ship_Effect_Caused_by_Refraction

4. The Ring Laser Gyrosope is inconsistent. Earth's rotation is pulled out of noise of an unknown cause. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Ring_Laser_Gyroscope

5. Moon Tilt Illusion. Questionable geometry of the Moon's phase. The illuminated portion often points away from the Sun. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Moon_Tilt_Illusion

6. Michelson Morley Experiment - An experiment where the nature of space and time was changed to explain experimental results of a horizontally motionless Earth lacking motion around the Sun. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Michelson-Morley_Experiment

7. Sensitive Torsion Balance Experiments have failed to detect the gravitation of the Sun. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Variations_in_Gravity#Celestial_Variations_in_G

8. Torsion Balance Experiments have failed to detect the gravitation of hills. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Variations_in_Gravity#Medium_Range_Variations_in_G

9. Gravity experiments have failed to detect the gravitation of mountains and continents. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Isostasy

10. Drop experiments have found no deviation from the Weak Equivalence Principle, Universality of Free Fall, or Newtonian Inverse Squared Law: https://wiki.tfes.org/Variations_in_Gravity

11. Inertial and Gravitational Mass are identical. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Evidence_for_Universal_Acceleration

12. Rowbotham's initial experiments tested the convexity of the earth in many interesting ways. See: https://wiki.tfes.org/Experimental_Evidence#The_Bedford_Canal_Experiments

13. Prediction in astronomy is based on epicycles. See https://wiki.tfes.org/Astronomical_Prediction_Based_on_Patterns

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the response, this is incredibly detailed and informative! I appreciate the effort you put into this and your inclusion of your sources.  I have read through some of the post so far, but I look forward to sitting down and getting a chance to dig deeper and read the full post.

Thanks again!

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Flat Earth Community / Do you remember when you first joined?
« on: October 27, 2019, 04:18:38 PM »
Hey folks, I've been lurking around for the past couple weeks and I'm curious if you remember what it was like when you first joined the community?  I'm putting a few questions in here because I'm interested in learning about how you feel this community has changed over time.

Do you feel that an online forum like this is the best way to communicate ideas and discuss theories?

When you first joined the forum, did you consider other websites/forums?

What was the inciting incident that lead you to become a member of TFES?

Has there ever been a time where you encountered a user who ‘went too far’ in an online discussion?  For example, when have you met a user who was completely toxic or do you feel like most users here are friendly?

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Thanks for the reply!  I'll do just that.

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Hello,

I am a student at DePaul University doing a study of online communities, and am interested in this site. It would be very helpful to my research to learn about someone's experiences as a participant.

This is a sociology class and we are studying virtual communities as a microcosm of material world communities.  I am interested in learning how you use this site as a way to discuss and investigate the Flat Earth Theory (Flat Earth Investigations and Flat Earth Theories are great boards for independent thought!).

No personal data (including site pseudonym if applicable) will be kept; the site will not be identified by name in the research presentation; and the goal is not to ridicule or delegitimize the site.

Would you be willing to participate in a short interview? For more information please reach out to me and I'll be happy to explain further.

Thank you for your time!

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