[Istheearthflat]

Like what is the basic evidence and idea for both sides? Basic idea nothing too complex (dont want to be demanding stuff you know)

People say im crazy when i think the earth might be flat but im not sure, so i just need basic science and ideas of both arguments

kind regards, merkify.

[supaluminus]

It isn't so much just a matter of providing "proof" so much as comparing the two models to things that we can measure in reality and gauging how many of our observations are consistent or inconsistent with each.

Flat earth model isn't consistent with reality. On first glance, it may seem that way, but there's always something hidden from the limited perspective we have as 6-foot tall upright hominids with binocular vision. We have a mountain of circumstantial evidence that confirms this.

Try to think of it in those terms instead.

[AATW]

Well. Multiple space agencies from different countries have taken photos of the globe from space.
You'd think that would be enough.

The accepted scientific model is of a (roughly) spherical earth orbiting a sun which is 93 million miles away and we have the moon orbiting the earth at a distance of about a quarter of a million miles away.

The test of a good model is that it works, it reflects reality and explains what we observe.

So what it boils down to whether you believe the entire scientific community over the last few hundred years whose model explains eclipses and seasons and sunsets and tides and the Coriolis effect and the observations of stars in different hemispheres.

Or do you believe some book written in the Victorian era by some bloke who believed crazy things like the moon generating its own cold light. The fact is the flat earth model doesn't work on any level. It cannot explain observations and attempts to make it do so always involve fudging things like inventing a "shadow object" to explain lunar eclipses or misunderstanding perspective to explain sunsets and boats disappearing over the horizon, and buildings.

The fact is GPS works. Satellite TV works. The ISS is visible from earth. The poles have both been explored. The airline industry gets us around using great circle routes which take account of the earth being a sphere. The flat earth model doesn't even have an agreed map.

You can never prove anything to people who have their mind fixed on a certain belief system of course.

[supaluminus]

You can never prove anything to people who have their mind fixed on a certain belief system of course.

"When an honest man discovers that he is mistaken, he either ceases to be mistaken, or he ceases being honest."

 - Anon

[AATW]

That's deep!

Was watching The Orville last week - the story was about a race of people who lived on a massive space ship which had been made to look like a natural environment.
Their leader refused to believe there was anything outside the ship but there were a group of dissenters. They were trying to persuade the leader and he was stubbornly refusing to budge. One of the characters said:

"Many people refuse to accept an irrefutable truth simply because that truth puts them in the wrong"

Pretty apt for some people on this place.

[Tom Bishop]

You can never prove anything to people who have their mind fixed on a certain belief system of course.

https://youtu.be/MoK2BKj7QYk

Come on. Read Earth Not a Globe.

Chapter XIV. Why a Ship's Hull Disappears Before the Mast Head

Chapter XIV: Perspectve on the Sea

[AATW]

Why? It is wrong about perspective. You demonstrated that you don't understand how perspective works in the real world in the thread about clouds being lit from below.
I even did an experiment and provided photographic proof that you are wrong about it.

[supaluminus]

You can never prove anything to people who have their mind fixed on a certain belief system of course.

https://youtu.be/MoK2BKj7QYk

Come on. Read Earth Not a Globe.

Chapter XIV. Why a Ship's Hull Disappears Before the Mast Head

Chapter XIV: Perspectve on the Sea

You may as well ask us to read "Of the Transmutation of Metals" by Paracelcus for all the good it would do to accurately describe the natural world, which is to say very little, if any at all.

Although, I think that might be an insult to Paracelcus.

[inquisitive]

You can never prove anything to people who have their mind fixed on a certain belief system of course.

https://youtu.be/MoK2BKj7QYk

Come on. Read Earth Not a Globe.

Chapter XIV. Why a Ship's Hull Disappears Before the Mast Head

Chapter XIV: Perspectve on the Sea

Still waiting for you to show any errors in timeanddate.com.  We can therefore be clear it is correct.

[Tom Bishop]

Why? It is wrong about perspective. You demonstrated that you don't understand how perspective works in the real world in the thread about clouds being lit from below.
I even did an experiment and provided photographic proof that you are wrong about it.

You need to come up with a rebuttal to Earth Not a Globe, not post an observation we performed a study on over 150 years ago.

[supaluminus]

Why? It is wrong about perspective. You demonstrated that you don't understand how perspective works in the real world in the thread about clouds being lit from below.
I even did an experiment and provided photographic proof that you are wrong about it.

You need to come up with a rebuttal to Earth Not a Globe, not post an observation we performed a study on over 150 years ago.

Rebuttal: The sun doesn’t shrink into the “vanishing point,” it sinks under the horizon. You can see this plainly by looking with a pair of protective glasses to compensate for the retina-roasting glare. You will clearly see a circle sink into the sea.

As for objects disappearing over the horizon, all you have to do is watch an object until it’s no longer visible to the naked eye, then take out a telescope. It will continue to creep under the horizon until disappearing.

You could go to the extreme and pluck Hubble out of the sky and repurpose it for land, it really doesn’t matter. Once the object is completely obscured by the side of curvature nearest you, no amount of telescoping will make a difference.

Ball earth’s in your court, friend.

[Pete Svarrior]

Rebuttal: The sun doesn’t shrink into the “vanishing point,” it sinks under the horizon. You can see this plainly by looking with a pair of protective glasses to compensate for the retina-roasting glare. You will clearly see a circle sink into the sea.

So your rebuttal boils down to "nuh uh, that's wrong!!!"

That's quite possibly a new low for newcomers here.

[supaluminus]

Rebuttal: The sun doesn’t shrink into the “vanishing point,” it sinks under the horizon. You can see this plainly by looking with a pair of protective glasses to compensate for the retina-roasting glare. You will clearly see a circle sink into the sea.

So your rebuttal boils down to "nuh uh, that's wrong!!!"

That's quite possibly a new low for newcomers here.

That hardly seems like a fair comparison.

If it boiled down to "nuh uh, that's wrong," there would be no alternative explanation provided, never mind explaining to you how, specifically, you can verify the explanation yourself. There would be no information whatsoever beyond the initial objection. Clearly there is, so I don't see how you can reduce that to "nuh uh, that's wrong" and do it with a straight face. That simply isn't fair or accurate.

Now, that is low if you know I'm right and you made this false equivalency intentionally. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were being reactionary, or skimming my rebuttal.

[Tom Bishop]

You, like many others, have provided no real evidence to your assertion, whereas Rowbotham does provide evidence, and does conduct a study on these matters. If you are not going to respond with evidence, you may as well not respond at all.

Hitchen's Razor asserts:

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
― Christopher Hitchen

[AATW]

Why? It is wrong about perspective. You demonstrated that you don't understand how perspective works in the real world in the thread about clouds being lit from below.
I even did an experiment and provided photographic proof that you are wrong about it.

You need to come up with a rebuttal to Earth Not a Globe, not post an observation we performed a study on over 150 years ago.

To be honest, I don't know what there is to rebut. I did look at those pages, they are full of quite wordy claims, things like:

"In a long row of lamps, standing on horizontal ground, the pedestals, if short, gradually diminish until at a distance of a few hundred yards they seem to disappear, and the upper and thinner parts of the lamp posts appear to touch the ground, as shown in the following diagram, fig. 77."

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that. It is a claim he makes, his evidence is "this is how it seems" and then he draws a little picture of how he saw it. Is that really the level of proof which is good enough for you? Quite bizarre given the level of proof you demand for things which don't fit in with your world view. In another thread on here you said

"That seems to be a statement rather than evidence."

The pages you directed me to are full of "statements". The only "evidence" is him saying that is what he saw. I'll be kind and concede that photography was in its infancy then so it would have been difficult for him to provide photographic proof but some could be provided now of the things he claims. Things obviously get smaller and less clear as they get further away but they don't disappear bottom first on a flat plane. So my rebuttal is "No they don't". Is that OK?

The bottom of the object never disappears if the two objects are on a plane (assuming no refraction or other atmospheric conditions, but if that were a factor then zooming would not "restore" the bottom, all optical zoom does is make things bigger). The whole object is just less clear as it recedes. The only way I can think of proving that is to think about how we see things at all. Light bounces off objects and in to our eyes. So long as there is clear line of sight between me and all of an object then I will be able to see all of it which, on a flat plane, there should always be. The only limiting factor would be atmospheric conditions. I've drawn a diagram showing how the light travels from the bottom of a distant person and the top of the person into my eye:



So I should be able to see the whole person, just less clearly as the person gets further away. Perspective is NOT a factor here. If photons can physically travel from both the bottom and the top of the object then I see the whole object,

If I was on a curve though then I would see less of the object because the curve in between me and the object and physically blocks the photons from the bottom, so in this diagram I only see the person's head:



I honestly don't know why you put so much stock in the writings of some bloke from the Victorian age who believed things like the moon is self-illuminated (emitting "cold light" and semi-transparent). His ideas have not revolutionised the scientific community because they are demonstrably not true.

[supaluminus]

You, like many others, have provided no real evidence to your assertion, whereas Rowbotham does provide evidence, and does conduct a study on these matters. If you are not going to respond with evidence, you may as well not respond at all.

Hitchen's Razor asserts:

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
― Christopher Hitchen

I defer to what I said at the top of the thread:

It isn't so much just a matter of providing "proof" so much as comparing the two models to things that we can measure in reality and gauging how many of our observations are consistent or inconsistent with each.

Flat earth model isn't consistent with reality. On first glance, it may seem that way, but there's always something hidden from the limited perspective we have as 6-foot tall upright hominids with binocular vision. We have a mountain of circumstantial evidence that confirms this.

Try to think of it in those terms instead.

[StinkyOne]

You, like many others, have provided no real evidence to your assertion, whereas Rowbotham does provide evidence, and does conduct a study on these matters. If you are not going to respond with evidence, you may as well not respond at all.

Hitchen's Razor asserts:

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
― Christopher Hitchen

Tom, we have empirical evidence. I can see the Sun drop below the horizon. It is impossible for it to be on the horizon in FEH to begin with. Care to revisit your earlier claim that a projectile fired at the sun on the horizon would hit it? (we both know in FEH the projectile would pass 3000 miles under the sun)  You follow a conman who also claims moonlight cools things down and that the continents float on the waters of the great deep. Just laughable.

Evidence of a round Earth:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Highlights/Rosetta_flybys

Not a NASA photo.

[KAL_9000]

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
― Christopher Hitchen

"If it's a quote from someone famous, it must be true!"
― KAL 9000

[supaluminus]

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
― Christopher Hitchen

"If it's a quote from someone famous, it must be true!"
― KAL 9000

That isn't helpful. The statement itself IS true, it's just not being applied accurately to THIS situation.