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Flat Earth Theory / YAFED - Yet Another Flat Earth Debate
« on: March 24, 2014, 01:47:15 PM »
Right, I won't argue about evidence for any of the two theories, flat or round, or say that someone is simply stupid, I will only say from my personal experience and knowledge, and let experienced members/users here discuss with me.
I happen to be a merchant navy officer and I have already made a few voyages around the earth/globe. Let me point out a few things:
1) A scientist named Mercator invented a method of projecting a spherical area to a 2D map. In order to do that efficiently he had to introduce distortion which increases logarithmically as you go close to the poles. At the poles distortion is infinite. This what we primarly used for navigation and is the safest because it shows all islands, dangers and obstructions. More at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection. Going from point A to point B we had two options: a) Go in a straight line a.k.a. rhumb line and make more miles b) Go in a great circle a.k.a. orthodrome while following the curvature of the earth and saves miles! This appears at the Mercator map as a bow.
2) While approaching a place, harbour, port etc. first we see tall buildings, towers, POIs (Points Of Interest for position fixing), Lighthouses then the rest (roads, small buildings and even people). And all these with a nominal visibility of 10 miles.
If we lived in a Flat Earth, with an ideal/perfect visibility everything would be visible, right? With proper "binoculars" I could see New York all the way from Greece! We wouldn't even have problem with radio waves... We do we need transponders anyway?
3) At this point let us not take into account the GPS satellites which are used for position fixing and follow the same principles as position fixing with celestial objects. If I wanted to travel from Europe to the US with no sort of electronic equipment, I would easily keep Polaris at the same height and go West! My latitude would not change. And I could easily cross check my position with the sun at midday.
4) Time zones... how do you explain that? Traveling west and we had to retard hour every a couple of days, travelling to the east and we had to advance an hour again every a couple of days. Passing the date line we had to retard and advance a whole day respectively.
I happen to be a merchant navy officer and I have already made a few voyages around the earth/globe. Let me point out a few things:
1) A scientist named Mercator invented a method of projecting a spherical area to a 2D map. In order to do that efficiently he had to introduce distortion which increases logarithmically as you go close to the poles. At the poles distortion is infinite. This what we primarly used for navigation and is the safest because it shows all islands, dangers and obstructions. More at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection. Going from point A to point B we had two options: a) Go in a straight line a.k.a. rhumb line and make more miles b) Go in a great circle a.k.a. orthodrome while following the curvature of the earth and saves miles! This appears at the Mercator map as a bow.
2) While approaching a place, harbour, port etc. first we see tall buildings, towers, POIs (Points Of Interest for position fixing), Lighthouses then the rest (roads, small buildings and even people). And all these with a nominal visibility of 10 miles.
If we lived in a Flat Earth, with an ideal/perfect visibility everything would be visible, right? With proper "binoculars" I could see New York all the way from Greece! We wouldn't even have problem with radio waves... We do we need transponders anyway?
3) At this point let us not take into account the GPS satellites which are used for position fixing and follow the same principles as position fixing with celestial objects. If I wanted to travel from Europe to the US with no sort of electronic equipment, I would easily keep Polaris at the same height and go West! My latitude would not change. And I could easily cross check my position with the sun at midday.
4) Time zones... how do you explain that? Traveling west and we had to retard hour every a couple of days, travelling to the east and we had to advance an hour again every a couple of days. Passing the date line we had to retard and advance a whole day respectively.