Yeah, I'm just suggesting that that's a critical flaw in the decision-making process, without claiming to be an authority myself. They'll run their experiment, they'll reach their conclusion (we both agree what it will be), and... what happens then?
Well, I guess what happens is either the YouTubers concede the point and stop being flat earthers - they're the ones who agreed this observation would be a problem for their version of FE. Or, more likely, they don't and are exposed as grifters. I think either outcome is potentially useful. And I don't think this experiment is a bad one. It's an expected result in RE, it's not in (some versions of) FE - to the point that I've seen FE people deny the 24 hour sun in Antarctica occurs.
And I guess the point is who should this bloke have approached? Who is the authority in FE? Is it fair to say there isn't one? Your whole philosophy seems to be "don't ask me, you make your own observations and figure it out for yourself". While I think people should be encouraged to check things for themselves - which they are, throughout science classes you do experiments and make observations - you seem to have a "every man for himself" philosophy which I would suggest is why there seems to be so little consensus in the FE community. Not that I even know what "FE community" really means. You are sneering at YouTube FE'ers, questioning their sincerity. Don't some of them call you "controlled opposition"? It all feels a bit Judean People's Front vs the People's Front of Judea, from the outside.
And where is it coming from?
This is a good question but as I said I couldn't see a "donate" button on the website. So why it could be an attempt at embezzlement, it's very unclear who they are embezzling from if so.
People get confused by the glass dome, I get that. As a visualisation, it has the same problem as trying to use a massively scaled-down ball to demonstrate gravity. The scaled-down FE model makes adjustments (replacing the atmolayer with a glass dome) to make it visually equivalent to the real efects of EA combined with internal reflection.
I guess the issue is it doesn't seem to be a particularly good model of the reality. There are a couple of videos on the Wiki. One he shines a torch through the glass dome and from certain angles it illuminates half the "earth". But is a torch a good representation of a sun which shines in all directions? Is solid glass a reasonable approximation for the atmolayer in terms of the way light through the medium. And isn't the FE sun inside where the dome is and above and circling the earth - he seems to have to shine the light more from the side to get the effect. I get it's just a model, I'm just not sure how valid it is.
In the second video it claims to show how stars could rotate in different directions, but no rotation is actually shown, just a static shot - which does admittedly look like how star trails may look near the equator but they're not shown rotating.
In terms of the 24 hour sun at Antarctica, I'm struggling to visualise how that would work. In the monopole model:
So A is the north pole, the sun circles it. When it's going round the red circle then it can't be seen because of EA. Fine.
When it's going round the yellow circle it can be seen at all times and goes in a circle. Also fine.
But if you're at B or C then the red circle is your summer. I can't see how that circular route would be seen from those points going in the opposite direction to the circle it's actually tracing. A common FE approach to that has been to simply deny it occurs at all. You seem to be saying it could but I can't see how that would actually work.
The bi-polar model may solve that but it seems to me it would introduce a load of other problems in terms of matching observations.
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