4541

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Disproof: Clouds lit from below at sunset.

« on: January 29, 2018, 10:06:43 PM »

That side view scene does not properly incorporate perspective. See the p-brane video that talks about those kind of scenes.

Well, it does "properly" incorporate perspective in that it doesn't incorporate it at all. Because it doesn't need to. My diagram shows how silly your claim is. The person has moved their hand so it looks from their perspective as if the distant light is below the level of their hand. But in real life lamps are taller than people so the shadow is still angled downwards.

I have watched the video.
p-brane is wrong about perspective.
Rowbotham is wrong about perspective.
You are wrong about perspective.

Think about how a shadow is cast. Photons from a light source hit an object. The angle of the shadow depends on the PHYSICAL relationship between the light source and the object.
Long shadows at sunset prove the sun is physically on the horizon. As I said you can prove this with an object and a torch in a dark room. Put the object on the floor and do an experiment. See if there is any other way of casting long shadows other than putting the torch near floor level. A sun 3000 miles high and 6000 miles away horizontally simply cannot do that.

To add:

The crazy claim that:

The distant lamp post is now looking up at your hand. The distant lamp post has the opposite perspective. It sees you at the horizon and it sees your hand slightly above the horizon, and therefore its photons are angled upwards at it.

From the person in my excellent diagram's perspective the lamp does look like it is above his hand.
From the person looking from the side's perspective - whose point of view I have drawn - you can see that the lamp is physically above the level of the person's hand. Of course it is. Lamp posts are taller than people.

If your claim was correct then the person with his hand up would see the shadow angled upwards, the person standing at the side would see it angled downwards because of their different perspectives. How can you possibly think that is so? The shadow is angled how it is angled for both people.

4542

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Disproof: Clouds lit from below at sunset.

« on: January 29, 2018, 02:47:09 PM »

As long as Tom thinks objects "see" perspective, there is no way to convince him that he is wrong. Tom once said that if you fire a projectile at the Sun on the horizon, that projectile would hit the sun.

It's interesting that Tom is actually correct about this. Two pieces of wrong thinking:
1) That the sun is 3000 miles above a flat earth and
2) That objects "see" perspective
Have cancelled themselves out to lead him to the correct conclusion, even if he got there for the wrong reasons.
I'm still amused at him saying that if you see a row of lampposts then you can raise your hand so that from your persepctive your hand is above the level of a distance lamp and thus:

The distant lamp post is now looking up at your hand
The distant lamp post has the opposite perspective. It sees you at the horizon and it sees your hand slightly above the horizon, and therefore its photons are angled upwards at it.

My emphasis. Meanwhile, in the real world...



I don't think I have ever seen Tom budge an inch in any of these debates no matter how wrong he is shown.
Meanwhlie he clings to Rowbotham, a man who thought the moon was translucent...

4543

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Disproof: Clouds lit from below at sunset.

« on: January 29, 2018, 01:12:00 PM »

Tom will dismiss that because it is a simulation. My challenge would be for him or some other flat earther to build a rudimentary scale model which represents the flat earth and the sun's position at what would be sunset and demonstrate that the sun would set and the shadows would be long at that sunset.
The only way for the long shadows we see at sunset to occur is if the sun is PHYSICALLY on the horizon.
You can demonstrate that with an object and a torch. Turn all the lights off, place the torch to scale roughly where the sun would be and observe the shadows.
If the sun is about 3,000 miles high and 6,000 miles away horizontally then the shadows cannot possibly be more than twice as long as the object is high.
So 1 meter high and 2 meters across would be the same - the angle would be the same so the shadow would be the same.
Either the light is bending somehow (Tom has stated it does not) or the sun is physically on the horizon.
Perspective doesn't cut it because shadow angle and length depends on the PHYSICAL relationship between light source and object, not anyone's perspective.

4544

Flat Earth Theory / Re: "The stars are not light-years away"

« on: January 29, 2018, 01:03:32 PM »

If you were to hear a single high pitch sound. You need knowledge of what that sound should sound like normally, if it even has a normal sound, for any gauge on the matter.

Correct. So the question is do we know what the "sound" is at rest?
And the answer is yes. Because scientists are not just saying "hey, this star looks a bit red". They are doing spectroscopy and looking at absorption lines which match the signature of certain elements. The lines of various elements are known to be always at the same part of the spectrum when at rest. If you see that same pattern of lines shifted towards the red end of the spectrum then either:
1) The source of that light is moving and it's Doppler shift or
2) The pattern is from some new element whose signature exactly matches that of a known element but the new element's signature is slightly shifted. It's an element we have never observed before.

1 is the only reasonable explanation.

4545

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Planes running into the earth

« on: January 29, 2018, 10:00:44 AM »

Would that work though? Lift is a force, gravity is a force. If the force of lift is greater than the force of gravity then you have liftoff.
But if the earth was simply accelerating upwards - the FE idea is that it is that acceleration which provides the force which we feel as gravity - then as soon as the plane left the ground it would no longer be pushed upwards by this acceleration so wouldn't the earth just accelerate back into it?
Wouldn't the only way to take off be to do so at a rate of acceleration greater than g?

My physics might be wrong here!

4546

Flat Earth Theory / Re: "The stars are not light-years away"

« on: January 29, 2018, 09:56:57 AM »

Observing a blue star and logically deducing that it is because it is blue it is approaching you is rationalization, and certainly not a direct evidence that will produce a direct conclusion, as a controlled experiment would provide.

Why do you keep ignoring what people are trying to explain to you?
If you know the pitch of an emergency vehicle siren at rest and you hear one where the pitch is higher than you would expect then you can deduce that the vehicle is moving towards you. If the pitch is lower than you would expect then you can deduce that the vehicle of moving away from you.
Doppler shift is proven every time a moving object which is making a sound goes past you, the reasons for it are well known.
That is basically what is going on here. Scientists are NOT saying "Hey, that star looks a bit red, it must be moving away from us".
What they are doing is doing spectroscopy and noticing that the absorption lines - the positions of which are known, analogous to the pitch of the siren at rest - are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. That shows Doppler shift and that shows movement.
The science between all this is well understood and proven.
You not understanding it, as you have repeatedly shown you don't, is not a counter argument.

4547

Flat Earth Theory / Re: NASA claim on mass doesn't matter in a vacuum.

« on: January 27, 2018, 11:19:34 PM »

That explanation is ignoring that under the theory of gravity the falling object is also pulling the earth towards it. "Mass doesn't matter" is clearly wrong.

Not clear what your point is there.
The mass of the two objects is not relevant to the speed they accelerate towards earth (ignoring air resistance) for the reasons I've given.
The two objects do indeed exert some force on the Earth but because their mass is so small (relative to the earth's mass) it doesn't cause the earth to move

(because f=am so a = f/m - and when the 'm' as as big as the earth's the f has to be pretty big to produce any significant 'a')

4548

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Disproof: Clouds lit from below at sunset.

« on: January 27, 2018, 10:43:27 PM »

p-brane. An apt name...
Quite simply, he and Rowbowtham are wrong about perspective. And here's why. Think about how you see things. Rays from a light source reflect off an object and in to your eye.
So if I am on a flat plane and so is someone/something else then there is no reason I shouldn't be able to see them because there will always be a clear line of sight between me and the other person/object:



The only limiting factors are clarity of the atmosphere and how good my eyes are. There will come a point where I can no longer see the person simply because the resolution of my eyes isn't good enough - if you think about it, the further apart the two people are above the smaller the angle of the rays at my eye and therefore the smaller the image on my retina. There will come a point where I am no longer able to see them, when that happens I could use a telescope and they would become visible again, if the atmospheric conditions allow.

If a person is walking away from me and going over a hill though, THEN the person would sink below the horizon because the curve of the hill would physically stop the rays of light getting to me:



The further away they go away from me on a circle (or, in 3D a sphere), the less I can see of them. In the above I only see their head because a ray of light from the person's feet to my eyes is blocked by the curve, there is no straight line between the lower part of the person and my eye that light can travel.

As I said above, a shadow is cast because the photons are physically blocked by the object. The angle and length of the shadow depend on the PHYSICAL relationship between the positions of the light source and object. So long shadows at sunset prove that the sun is physically on the horizon so either the light is bending or the sun is disappearing below the curve of the earth. Pick one. But those are the only two explanations which can work.

If you think the perspective argument holds any water then build a basic scale model to show how this would work. I have seen YouTube videos where someone shows with a coin how a sun could "set" on a flat earth using a coin and a table but
a) Those videos show the coin ON the table, not above it and
b) To produce the effect the camera is held at what in real life would be below ground level.

4549

Flat Earth Theory / Re: NASA claim on mass doesn't matter in a vacuum.

« on: January 27, 2018, 08:39:19 PM »

I've honestly no idea how this got onto black holes. My physics is a bit rusty but I think this is correct. The formula for gravitational attraction is:

f = G (M1 x M2) / r2

G being a constant, M1 and M2 being the masses of the two objects. r being the distance between the two objects' centre of gravitys
So if M1 is my mass, M2 is the earth's mass then the above gives you the force the earth exerts on me (which is my weight, that's what weight is).

But we also know that

f = ma

F = force, m = mass, a = acceleration.

This can be arranged as

a = f/m

This, by the way, is what makes super sonic travel so expensive, the more "m" there is, the more "f" you have to provide to produce "a".

So the acceleration on me because of gravity is the force of gravity on me divided by my mass. Using the above two formulas that is:

(G (M1 x M2) / r2) / M1.

The two M1s cancel themselves out so it's:

(G M2 / r2)

Point being, this force is independent of MY mass, it only relies on the mass of the earth which pretty much remains constant and my distance from the earth's centre of gravity - which does vary slightly because the earth is not a perfect sphere. But the headline is that objects of different mass will fall at the same rate.

That is what Galileo proved by dropping cannonballs of different sizes out of high buildings and observing that they hit the ground at the same time. The reason this doesn't work with feathers and hammers on earth is air resistance which slows the feather's fall (and the hammer's, but not enough so's you'd notice because of the mass of the hammer). On the moon there is no atmosphere and so no air resistance so they fall at the same rate, hence the astronaut's exclamation "what do you know, Mr Galileo was right!"

The effect was recreated in a vaccuum chamber for a BBC series

4550

Flat Earth Theory / Re: "The stars are not light-years away"

« on: January 27, 2018, 08:07:43 PM »

With respect, the level of ignorance in that post is pretty spectacular.
The way this works is that certain elements have distinctive "signatures".
The Doppler effect shifts those signatures which shows they are moving, just as the pitch of a siren indicates that an emergency vehicle is moving and whether it's higher or lower than its pitch at rest indicates whether it is moving towards you or away.

4551

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Disproof: Clouds lit from below at sunset.

« on: January 27, 2018, 07:57:41 PM »

The error in your experiment is that you just put your camera below the cube. The cube is not seeing the light source parallel to it, as would be possible if it were distant enough. The cube and the light source would become eye level to each other with long distance perspective. If the light were at the horizon the cube would see it at 90 degrees, and would be lit from its side rather than from the top, just as your face is lit from the side and not from the top during sunset.

OK. Thank you for your response. Your mistake is that cubes and mountains can't see. I know you're using the term metaphorically but perspective is NOT a factor in how shadows are cast.

You said:

If we have a series of lamp posts stretching into the horizon, it is possible to raise your hand to be above a small lamp post on the horizon in the distance. The distant lamp post is now looking up at your hand. The distant lamp post has the opposite perspective. It sees you at the horizon and it sees your hand slightly above the horizon, and therefore its photons are angled upwards at it.

That just isn't how things work in real life. This is what an observer would see:



So while yes, I could raise my hand and it would look from my perspective as though my hand was above the far lamp post, the lamp post light is still physically above the level of my hand. You can extend that row of lamp-posts as far as you like, all that would change is the angle which would become shallower but the shadow would always be angled downwards. The only way a shadow can be cast upwards is if the light source is physically below the level of the object which the shadow is cast of.

So, coming back to the sun and the mountain, I drew this very rough diagram. To even show them on the same scale I have imagined a mountain 1000 miles high.
The sun is 3000 miles high in your model, right?
I've shown the angle of the shadow if the sun is 4000 or 9000 miles away horizontally. From what I understand it can never actually be much further than that in daylight.
You can see that all that changes is the angle of the shadow:



What can never happen in your model are shadows being cast upwards. What is also not possible are the long shadows you get at sunrise or sunset:



The physical angle between the sun and the people would never be shallow enough to cause that.
So, the earth might well be flat BUT the sun cannot be 3000 miles above it at sunrise at sunset, the angle of the shadows proves that.

4552

Flat Earth Theory / Re: "The stars are not light-years away"

« on: January 27, 2018, 08:45:01 AM »

The wiki shows that we can use the same data that computed the sun to be millions of miles away, to be thousands of miles away. The data used is the same.

Yes, that is another possible explanation - distant sun means pretty much parallel rays so for the shadows to be different the surface must be curved.
It is possible that IF the sun is much closer then the same effect could be seen on a flat surface, but the article your own Wiki links to concludes:

We conclude that the flat earth/near sun model does not work.

You are the one claiming that the alternative interpretation of the data is the correct one - contrary to basically everyone else in science.
So prove it. You can take some observations, do some triangulation.
You keep dodging this because at some level you know would happen.

And it's bit rich pretending to talk knowledgeably about shadows and how to interpret data from experiments on them when you have claimed that if I raise my hand above my head then because a distant lamp appears below my hand level the photons from that lamp are angled up towards it. 

4553

Flat Earth Theory / Re: "The stars are not light-years away"

« on: January 26, 2018, 10:42:02 PM »

As explained many times before do the measurements from more than 2 locations.  Why do you not understand this and do the experiment?

If you are claiming that a specific observation that favors your model of the earth will be seen if some specific experiment is performed simultaneously from three different location on earth, it is your responsibility to organize that experiment. Why would you expect me to do your work for you? Are you funding me?

Hang on. The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. The accepted explanation of the stick experiment is that the sun is distant and the earth is therefore spherical.
You are the one making the claim that the earth is in fact flat and the sun is much closer. The burden of proof lies with you. And it's a relatively easy thing to prove.
All you have to do is take some measurements of the sun or the moon from a few cities, measure the angles, do the maths and you can triangulate to find the sun or moon's distance.
Do that and if the maths works out how you think it will then congratulations, you've won yourself a Nobel prize.

4554

Flat Earth Theory / Re: You Can Neither Demonstrate Nor Defend Flat Earth Without Invoking Conspiracy

« on: January 26, 2018, 06:02:10 PM »

Usually Tom will answer everything. At some point you won't accept something he says or some evidence he points to. He may give further examples. You won't accept them either. Where is he going to go from there? He's showed you his reasons, you don't agree ... that's the end of the debate. He told you everything he could, he told you why he thinks what he thinks and you didn't accept it. What are you hoping to acheive? Are you expecting to be the person who convinces Tom the world is round? Or are you expecting Tom to convince you that it is flat? There is no winner. It is an exchange of ideas and once those ideas are exchanged, the thread is done and Tom will leave it.

That really isn't my experience of threads where I've seen Tom debating stuff. Look at this thread for example, the one I mentioned above
https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=6875.160
His explanation for the angle of shadows is ludicrous. I did an experiment which proved how silly it was and have provided photographic proof. Later down the page I provided a diagram showing he is wrong. How is that the end of the debate? He has made a claim about why the shadows are angled as they are. He provides no evidence or proof, he just states it. I take the time to do an experiment which proves him wrong and he ignores it. He hasn't showed his reasons, he just stated his position and when I proved him wrong he walked away from the thread. I've seen him do it to other people too.
I guess I don't expect Tom admit he is wrong. He has staked too much on this, the cognitive dissonance just won't let him. But there are other people looking here who might see the things I and others post and it might sway them. One could argue why does it matter what shape the world is. I just think the truth is important and worth standing up for, especially in the "post truth" world we find ourselves in where it increasingly doesn't seem to matter to people what is true. It does matter. Sensible debate has to start with a shared model of reality.
If you can't answer basic questions like "how can the sun shine sideways to illuminate the moon so we can see it but not shine diagonally so we can see it at night" then you have to question how well your model works. Which doesn't mean there is no possible flat earth model which could work, but the one presented in your Wiki doesn't.

4555

Flat Earth Theory / Re: You Can Neither Demonstrate Nor Defend Flat Earth Without Invoking Conspiracy

« on: January 26, 2018, 04:16:18 PM »

Imagine you have been a flat earther for 10 years. You've made 50,000 posts, gone over every topic again and again. And someone signs up with a new account and asks you about gravity, or Coriolis, or satellites. How enthusiastic are you going to be about having that 'debate' for the 400th time? Meanwhile someone is talking about a new film that has come out or some new game or hardware in the lower fora. Which thread are you going to engage in?

Fairly reasonable. But my frustration is my thread about the FE sun was based on your Wiki. I had some questions which I didn't feel were answered in the Wiki so they seemed like reasonable questions and while the thread did generate a few pages of debate there were some fairly fundamental questions which just weren't answered. It feels like if you (plural) don't have answers you don't engage. If you're serious about a FE model that works you should be engaging with this stuff. Or, if you have and there are reasonable responses then you could at least point us in the right direction.

My frustration with Tom in particular is he does engage with debates but then walks away from them when he's shown to be wrong. He then says "there are 100 REs for every FE, I can't reply to everyone". But actually the upper fora aren't that busy here, he has time to engage when he wants to, he just stops doing so when someone proves him wrong about something as he did when I proved him wrong on perspective and shadows. I even took the time to do an experiment to demonstrate my point. The two reasonable responses then are either a reply which explains why I am mistaken and my proof is inadequate or to admit he's wrong. He did neither, he just walked away from the thread.

4556

Flat Earth Theory / Re: You Can Neither Demonstrate Nor Defend Flat Earth Without Invoking Conspiracy

« on: January 26, 2018, 03:33:56 PM »

When I first went to this website I wanted to debate, but I've learned that you don't debate on this website, you just bring up points and get no complete responses.

Same. I signed up because I am genuinely fascinated by FE Theory, the idea that people in this day and age can still believe this is interesting.
So I signed up to debate the issues and try and understand how their model works.

The issue is, their model doesn't work on any level. I posted a thread about the FE Sun - I read through their Wiki first and my questions were based on what it says there. It did generate some debate but most of the difficult questions I asked remain unanswered - how the sun's orbit works, how it can be a spotlight and yet still illuminate the moon sideways etc. I guess the reason is there are no answers to these things. Which makes me wonder if this whole site is a joke and we are being trolled. Pretty much the first question in their FAQ is "is this site a joke" and they claim not, but the FE model they currently have falls so flat (pun intended) and so spectacularly fails to explain observations that you have to wonder whether they really believe it. There is a lot of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance going on, but still.

4557

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: why would the government want to hide it if the earth was flat?

« on: January 26, 2018, 02:46:14 PM »

 

Yes I do...

Although let's pretend I meant round as in a disc is round.

4558

Flat Earth Theory / Re: You Can Neither Demonstrate Nor Defend Flat Earth Without Invoking Conspiracy

« on: January 26, 2018, 01:10:36 PM »

Correct. Tom said

as per the argument of how the sun can be lower than the mountain in order to look up at it, this was discussed earlier in this thread. If we have a series of lamp posts stretching into the horizon, it is possible and raise your hand to be above a small lamp post on the horizon in the distance. The distant lamp post is now looking up at your hand.
The distant lamp post has the opposite perspective. It sees you at the horizon and it sees your hand slightly above the horizon, and therefore its photons are angled upwards at it.

And I as I said to him in my reply, this is the same level of logic as "when I close my eyes I can't see anything, therefore nothing can see me and I have thus become invisible".
It's the reasoning of a young child.

The angle of a shadow depends on the PHYSICAL relative positions of the light source and the object which the shadow is cast of, not your perspective.

4559

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: why would the government want to hide it if the earth was flat?

« on: January 26, 2018, 01:05:48 PM »

This.

I consistently see Flat Earthers reference huge sums of money ($19 billion/year!!!; 52 million/day!!!1!), and claim that NASA keeps all of this money. What they fail to consider is the costs of the conspiracy. First, NASA spends much of its money on private/public contractors. These include Lockheed, Boeing, ESA, SpaceX, ULA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, etc. Billions are given to these companies to manufacture NASA's parts, and pay salaries. And, continuing with salaries, NASA needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to pay their own employees. NASA needs to pay for rocket fuel, to launch the rockets, maintain the facilities they use, fund research and development, pay for satellites, and so much more. The accusation that NASA could keep any of that money is ridiculous.

The point is, even if it did emerge that NASA had been lying to us all the time, we never went to the moon, the ISS is fake, they can't launch satellites into space, it's all a big racket.
Let's pretend all of that is true. That still doesn't prove the earth is round. What NASA and other space agencies are doing simply confirm what we've known for millennia, we're living on a globe.
Eratosthenes' famous stick experiment shows that. A possible alternative explanation is that the sun is much closer and nearer than supposed, but there are easy ways to verify that - take some measurements, do some triangulation. That is literally all they have to do.

To be a flat earther you have to start with the assumption that the earth is flat and then work everything around that. So when NASA come along and do their thing then that has to be explained away.
Although my satellite TV was working just fine last night, and that relies on a satellites which weren't put up by NASA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_(satellite)#Manufacture_and_launch
So I guess they're "in on it" too?

Makes zero sense. And, to respond to the original post, I have no idea what the motive of any government would be to hide this great "truth" from us about the shape of the world.

4560

Flat Earth Theory / Re: You Can Neither Demonstrate Nor Defend Flat Earth Without Invoking Conspiracy

« on: January 26, 2018, 10:35:30 AM »

Tom basically stops replying when he's shown to be wrong. In the "clouds lit from below" thread Tom claimed that perspective causes the effect (he claimed that If I raise my hand so it looks like it is above a distant light then the shadow is cast upwards). I did an experiment to prove him wrong, posted photographic evidence. No response. I subsequently drew this diagram to say how ridiculous his claim was:



There is no way to cling to flat earth theory without invoking conspiracy. NASA, every other space agency, the airline industry, the cruise line industry, the satellite TV industry, the GPS industry.
A LOT of people would have to be "in on it". And why? Why is the "fact" that the earth is flat such a terrible truth which must be hidden from us. I know the answer to some of that are that "NASA think it's a sphere so their CGI images show it that way" but it's still a conspiracy because they are hiding the truth that they can't go into space, as are some of the other people I mentioned.

Their Occam's Razor page says:
"What's the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter straight up at 7 miles per second, and that NASA can do the impossible on a daily basis, explore the solar system, and constantly wow the nation by landing a man on the moon and sending robots to mars; or is the simplest explanation that they really can't do all of that stuff?"

I would counter that by saying something like:
"What's the simplest explanation; that NASA, every other space agency, the people who run GPS, satellite TV, weather and communication satellites, the airline and cruise line industry who plot their routes based on a spherical earth...is it simpler to think that they are all lying to us to us for reasons which are not well explained and that all of science is wrong; or is the simplest explanation that the earth is indeed spherical?"