I assume Iactuallycanthink believes the earth is round, which is great! I think so too. If you use the conventional model of our Earth orbiting a celestial star, the Sun, it is accelerating and maintaining a constant speed. For the sake of argument, though, has anyone ever suggested that a flat earth could simply do the same? If it were facing inward, centrifugal force could plausibly create a gravitational force similar to our planet’s own.
Please get back with me if I sound crazy. This is the first time I put that thought out and I’m NOT a flat earther I swear!
That's actually a great idea. There is nothing at all wrong with using your imagination, now you've given people something interesting to think about.
If the Earth were a disk, attached to the sun with a a rope and spun around it fast enough we would indeed experience centrifugal force, and it would be very similar to gravity.
The difference would be the Coriolis force for anything thrown or launched into the air, making it curve. On something as big as a planet this effect would be small but absolutely measurable and we would have seen it. Artillery shells for instance would need to be corrected for it. Long distance battleship guns in fact have to take into account the curve and rotation of the Earth, so on a flat Earth being spun we would need different corrections.
Math time! I used to design make believe rotating space stations in my spare time when I was younger, so I remember the formula for centrifugal force. (With help from Wikipedia)
g = v^2 / r
So g is the gravitational acceleration felt in meters per second, v is the radial velocity in meters per second, r is the radius in meters.
We can rearrange that to this to solve for the radial velocity.
v = (g * r)^0.5
We want 1g for the liner acceleration so that is 9.8m/s
Lets set the radius at 150,000,000,000m which is the distance to the Sun.
So we get...
( 150,000,000,000 * 9.8 ) ^ 0.5 = 1,212,435m/s
So that's pretty fast. The speed of light is 299,792,458m/s so that's nearly 0.5 percent of the speed of light. Whoo.
That speed would make one year about 9 days long.
If you fell off the edge, you would go flying off into space away from the sun at 0.5c for free. This would make launching deep space probes super easy, just push it off the edge. Getting them back would be a problem.
Launching anything sunward would be interesting. If you weren't careful it would slam back into the disk as it was being slung around.
This would make an awesome setting for a sci-fi story, actually. Finding some crazy flat planet tethered to a star that aliens built. I'd read that!
( Edit: Well duh, that's basically Niven's Ringworld stories but a disk instead of a ring. Same distance and speed, hah. The sci-fi comment made me remember it. )