Hello Flat Earth Society,
I come to you today to inform you that my beloved father and teacher Prof. Klaus Penbender has passed. He prided himself on finding the truth of the world and finding out what lies may be prevalent in the scientific community. To be honest I was far from understanding most of his reasoning but I do know that he was passionate about his work. He toiled away endlessly and… I remember he’d frequently talk about “showing those Flat Earthers” I was never sure what he meant by that and now that he’s passed I decided to start looking and I found this place. Intrigued I cracked open his notes and was astonished by many things I was never informed about. Primarily over 700 pages of something he called “cubezoidal earth.” Cubezoidal seems to be a term he’d created, as well as something called a “rhombus cube.” He seemed to want to not only redefine the shape of the Earth but redefine shapes entirely. I can’t say I’m fully convinced of his theories but I also can’t understand most of his writings. His handwriting alone is nearly impossible to decipher. Though I’d hardly call my father unreliable, he has studied astronomy and physics for most of his life.
Nevertheless I feel a responsibility to post what I can make out because before his abrupt passing he planned to share his findings with this forum.
1. The Earth has a changing shape, Was once spherical, was once flat, and was once “cubezoidal” but is now morphing into a catastrophic and dangerous shape which accounts for the more unpredictable weather as of late.
2.The physics of the Earth are an enigma that human understanding may not be able to comprehend
3. The shape of the Earth is just the tip of the iceberg
His math is confusing. I’ve written out what I can decipher. From what I can work out, it pretty much makes sense with what he’s suggesting. Take a look.
Suppose we have a three-dimensional wave function in position space (r), then we can write this functions as a weighted sum of orthogonal basis functions j(r):
or, in the continuous case, as an integral
It is clear that if we specify the set of functions j(r), say as the set of eigenfunctions of the momentum operator, the function (k) holds all the information necessary to reconstruct (r) and is therefore an alternative description for the state .
In quantum mechanics, the momentum operator is given by
(see matrix calculus for the denominator notation) with appropriate domain. The eigenfunctions are
and eigenvalues ħk. So
and we see that the momentum representation is related to the position representation by a Fourier transform.
So the Earth is definitely changing shape… what this means I’m not sure.
Anyhow I am mainly just asking that you respect my father and give him your love and best wishes. He spent the past 6 years working on this and he still wasn’t completely finished. Even though he disagreed with you on the Earth being flat, I feel he has a sense of respect for your assertions.
My mother, Gertrude, is still alive and quite well. She’s had some pains, night terrors and a couple stroke scares but otherwise doesn’t need to see a doctor or anything like that. Maybe one day the lot of you will come around to agree with the Penbender Theory.
Also, for those curious, I did manage to find his original post on these forums:
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=30716.0#.Vo9Ez_krKbg