21

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: "Behind the Curve" experiments [looking for flat earther responses]

« on: March 12, 2019, 07:44:59 PM »

The two guys who made the "balls ups" in the Behind The Curve documentary - Bob Knodel and Jeran Campanella - took down their YouTube channel the other day.

I suppose that's a kind of flat earth response to those experiments - though it may be unrelated, and perhaps has more to do with a different Youtube flat earther being caught with some compromising links among his bookmarks.

It looks like Jeran is back up and posting stuff, but the globe busters still shows no videos.

22

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 07:40:06 PM »

Well, I have to disagree with you there. A shadow and location are both objects.

A shadow is an area in which a specific thing doesn't exist. How can the non-existence of something be an object? Never mind.

I must bow out of the discussion of whether a shadow and a location are objects because I would be trolling if I continued, and I've already been punished for expressing too much satire in the upper forums, even though the bulk of my posts were more serious than yours. 

23

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat

« on: March 12, 2019, 05:24:21 PM »

In regards to the Concorde, and atmospheric pressure in general, 90% of the atmosphere is within the first 10% of its altitude.  You can not simply compare the service altitude of the Concorde to the theoretical altitude of space in the manner that you did when discussing pressure.

I don't see why not. As you should know, the air we breath is pressurized at about 14.7 pounds per square inch.
That literally means that if you closed the cap on a pop bottle and sent it to space, there would be air pressure inside it pressing out on all parts of the bottle -- 14.7 pounds on each square inch.
(Till it got cold and the air shrank but never mind that.)

So the real heart of the issue is whether or not the Concorde - or any manmade vessel - did or could withstand the vacuum of space with people onboard.

So the Concorde, flying at 68,000 feet, with 14.7 psi absolute inside, and 0.73 psi outside, had a pressure on its cabin walls of almost 14 psi!

By the way, people can survive in air pressures quite a bit below 14.7 psi.
In fact, a lot of older passenger jetliners actually fly with around 12 psi in the cabin.

So the body of the Concorde could very easily hold an air pressure that would very easily allow people to live quite comfortably whilst in space.

It is very meaningful to demonstrate that people have flown millions of flights in an aircraft that literally withstood 95% of the vacuum of space while maintaining 14.7psi in the cabin, and it very well could (structurally) have maintained a living cabin pressure of 12psi while in the total vacuum of space.

(Now obviously its engines and stuff were made for air breathing areas, but I'm talking about the cabin construction which had to handle the pressure differential of space.)

24

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:52:37 PM »

I am aware of the definition of coincidence. Yet the two examples I provided do not make use of this definition. I agree that your example fails, but my two examples hold to demonstrate cases where objects move faster than c. Surely you must see this.

Oh I thought you were saying that the contact point of the wave hitting the shore was going faster than the speed of light, and that the bug's shadow was going faster than the speed of light.
And you're calling these two things objects.

But in fact, in the case of the bug, his shadow is not an object.
You might at least be able to say the light shining around the bug was an object, but that's not true either - it is an infinite number of light waves leaving a source and arriving at different destinations.
As the bug moves, light begins to shine in one area and stops shining in another area nearby -- but those were two beams of light, and two incidences that happened to coincide. But they were not the same object. A coincidence is not an object.

Same thing with the wave hitting the shore: No object is moving down the shore. The apparent contact point may be, but that is not an object.
The waves leaving the wave generator (whatever it was) are multiple paths of wave energy, traveling in different directions through different groups of water molecules, and arriving at different destinations.
When the wave hits the shore at point A and slightly later at point B, it is not an object moving, it is two incidences coinciding.

But nothing in your examples are moving faster than the speed of light.

25

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:43:16 PM »

Remember the Concorde jet? that buzzard flew so high that it was practically in the same vacuum of space. At least 90% of the way there.

During testing, Concorde F-WTSB attained the highest altitude recorded in sustained level flight of a passenger aircraft of 68,000 ft, in June 1973.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line

Are you trying to tell me that 20 km is 90% of 100 km?

How kind of you to grace my post with such a well researched reply!

So at 68,000 ft altitude, the air pressure is about 0.73 PSI.
Considering that sea-level air pressure is around 14.7 PSI, and space is around 0, we see that 0.73PSI is 5% of normal sea level air pressure.

So you're right I was wrong, the Concorde didn't fly in an atmospheric pressure that was 90% of the vacuum of space, it flew in conditions that was 95% of the vacuum of space!

Another 0.73psi less, and it *would* have been in space, but obviously it wouldn't have been flying.

26

Flat Earth Projects / Re: Attempting to actually measure gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:27:27 PM »

Yes, it sounds like you come at this from an engineering background, whereas I come from a physics one. So our way of thinking about it may differ. No matter, I’ll just be more careful in my exposition.

So the equation for a simple harmonic oscillator derived for a pendulum is a second order differential equation with angular frequency given by /sqrt(g/L). If you add another force on the side, this will modify this equation to yield an angular frequency of /sqrt([g-g’]/L), where g’ is the acceleration from the lead weight: GM/d^2.

Question:

Do you agree that if I put more mass above my pendulum it will slow down, and if I put more mass below it, it will speed up, and that at the correct position besides it, more mass would neither slow it nor speed it?

For the drag, yes you pumped the jar, but it is not a pure vacuum in there, right?

Yeah, probably a 99% vacuum. My micron vacuum gauge is on loan to a friend at the moment, but my HVAC pump does a pretty good job.
Good enough that a goose down feather falls like a BB and bounces in the vacuum. So I would say the drag on my round dense tungsten weight is probably quite minimal.

You just reduced the air density beyond the precision of your psi meter. Achieving a near vacuum is an expensive and time consuming process requiring heat pumps, throttling techniques, and some others I do not recall at the moment. So your drag is reduced, but not absent. Since the force you attempt to measure is very small, are you certain that the drag has been reduced enough? It could be that the drag is still the same order of magnitude as the effect you purpose to measure. That’s why checking this is useful.

You may be missing the entire underlying principle of my experiment.

Drag primarily causes loss of efficiency. The pendulum just won't swing as long on it's own if there's too much drag. But the frequency will still be rather stable because it's primarily determined by the length of the pendulum and the force acting upon it.
So if I can maintain constant drag (by having it in a vacuum jar) and constant pendulum length, then the only other major variable is the gravitational force in the vertical axis.

Now of course there are other small effects, temperature can change the length of my aluminum pendulum shaft, light can create a photoelectric effect and charge up my pendulum, and so on and so on.
And a shift in local level (like if the table it's on gets tipped a bit) might upset the frequency a little due to the fact that the moment at which the excitation pulse is fired will actually not be centered in the swing.

But my plans are, Lord Willing, to actually move it to a place where it's bolted down to a 2000 pound steel machine that's sitting on concrete, and put a light shield around it to reduce possible outside influences.

But anyway, even if there is drag, the frequency is still primarily a function of pendulum length and gravitational force in the vertical axis.
So by taking a long reading without the lead weights under it then another long reading with the lead weights under it, without changing the drag or anything else, then I should be able to get a difference in frequency and from that calculate the difference in gravitational force.

Does that make sense?

Can you see how the effect of the drag would be self-canceling, and it's really a differential measurement where gravitational force is the only major input variable?

And if you have a better idea for measuring gravity I'm all ears!

27

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 05:11:50 AM »

It is strange that you think a shadow is a coincidence. Not sure I get that. Please feel free to enlighten me (although unlike Buddhist koans, my examples can be demonstrated mathematically).

I am certainly not disappointed in you, and fully expect that those functions will soon be forthcoming.

My apologies. I was using the term in the technical sense, and assumed you had the background to know what I was talking about.

In Engineering, a coincidence is any time two things happen at the same time. That is to say, they coincide.

When a light flashes, and two different sectors of that light radiate out and reach their target at the same time, we say they coincide, or are coincident. 

And it's not always even used in parallel settings: Sometimes two Geiger-Muller  counter tubes are lined up and the signals are measured for coincidence - when a high speed particle smashes through one then through the other, the two signals coincide, and it is then believed that the direction of the particle is known. Even though the two signals coincided doesn't mean that it was pure chance that they happened around the same time because after all the same particle triggered them both -- so its not that random chance kind of coincidence - it's the kind of coincidence that just means they happened at the same time, or close enough for it to qualify for whatever special conditions were trying to be met (i.e. that the particle traveled in a straight line from one sensor tube to the other.)

So yes - if a light flashes and light waves go out in all directions and hit multiple targets at the same time you can't really say that anything was traveling faster than the speed of light.

If you change it slightly and say that the light hit target A slightly before target B, and try to say that the light went from target A to target B  faster than the speed of light, then you're silly because the light doesn't come from target A to target B -- it goes to both targets from the light source -- and it does not travel  faster than the speed of light.

Only by a contorted figurative wording can you say that a sweeping light beam sweeps faster than the speed of light.

Hopefully that makes a little more sense!

28

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:59:13 AM »

So I went to the frequently asked questions and it had a subsection on this. However, it didn't actually answer the question - it went on a tangent about how "we are not suggesting that space agencies are aware that the earth is flat and actively covering the fact up. They depict the earth as being round simply because that is what they expect it to be."
So does this mean that people have never been to space?
As I said, the answer doesn't really address the question, and just wondering what the answer is!
If you could help, that'd be great.

If you are prone to doubt that people have been to space, think again.
Remember the Concorde jet? that buzzard flew so high that it was practically in the same vacuum of space. At least 90% of the way there. That thing seriously could have maintained a living pressure inside the crew quarters while in space with a few modifications. And that was in 1965! So possible? Definitely. There's no space like home.

29

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Mount Everest?

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:50:21 AM »

If Earth really was flat, wouldn't we be able to see Mount Everest from almost any point on Earth with a telescope?
this question came in my mind and thought i would share it

Great question, but generally no, you would not be able to see it.
Haze in the air makes it very difficult to see anything terrestrial beyond 100-200 miles.

HOWEVER, if the sun was setting on the far side of Mt. Everest from you, you should be able to see the top of the mountain silhouetted in front of the setting sun.

Because the sun is often seen sliding down behind distant mountain ranges.
 

30

Flat Earth Projects / Re: Attempting to actually measure gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 04:46:07 AM »

Right, and local gravity would be affected with weights on one side. You have a tension, and weight, and now a grav force from the lead side weights. Those three vectors add, and so this would certainly impact the frequency.

Hmm, I'm not sure about that. If I add gravitational pull from above, it'll reduce the frequency. If I put gravitational pull from below, it'll increase the frequency.
However is there not a position on the side where if I add the pull of gravity it will neither increase nor decrease the frequency, but simply cause a slight tilt in the apparent local level?
I'll have to think about that.

The direction of oscillation has a sine component of the weight and a component in the opposite direction from the lead weights. Just draw a free body diagram and write Newton’s laws to produce the wave equation. Take sine_theta ~ theta for small angles.

The drag should be quadratic in speed and bases on a other coefficients.

D~ (1/2)*rho*A*v^2, where tho is the fluid density, and A is the cross sectional area. In reality you should include a form factor, but it is of order unity so not that important.

The main thing behind my query was to check that the drag forces were not of the same order as the force you are trying to measure. It is a good thing to check.

Are you talking about the drag forces of air resistance and bearing resistance which reduce the Q, or dampen the oscillation movement?

That's why I put it in a vacuum, to reduce air drag.
And that's why I used a razor blade edge pivot.
It feels like we're talking different languages, I hope I'm understanding you correctly!

31

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 12, 2019, 12:08:10 AM »

Another: have a big move across a transparent plate. Shine a light on the bug and put a screen below it. You will see the shadow move across the screen. Now move the screen very far away. The shadow will be moving faster.

Challenge: find the minimum distance between the bug and the screen such that the shadow moves at c. It will be a function of the bug’s walking speed.

Oh my friend you disappoint me. 

I wondered if it was the lighthouse paradox though when you first mentioned it. I almost said "Yeah but you have to reddfine "thing" to be "A coincidence."

You could make it much simpler:

A light house flashes. Two observers, on opposite sides a hundred miles away, see the flash at exactly the same time.
The speed with which it got from one observer to the other is infinite.

Of course it's a joke because it's not that  a thing moved faster than the speed of light, it's that multiple things left an origin, traveled at no more than the speed of light and arrived at different destinations simultaneously.

But I will grant that if you want to call a coincidence a thing (which really aint fair since a coincidence cannot be had without multiple things) and when you say that some thing can move faster than the speed of light it naturally leads the reader to think of a thing.

But I guess it's along the lines of if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, did it really fall?

32

Flat Earth Projects / Re: Attempting to actually measure gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 11:56:03 PM »

Tom,

Cool idea. But why not place the lead weights on one side?

Because that wouldn't change the frequency, it would only change the local level, and only very slightly. My setup is not ridged enough to detect a change in local level reliably.
(However, my firmware does measure the local level based on how much time the pendulum spends on each side of the zero crossing sensor, so theoretically I could detect a change in local level.)
But for now, I just want to measure change in frequency.

When beneath, then any effect from the weights would reduced by drag forces - they both would decrease amplitude. On the side they may partially cancel.

I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to express there, my friend. Perhaps try again?
More gravitational pull downwards would increase the swing frequency.
The swing frequency is a function of two things: Pendulum length, and gravitational force.

I see that you pumped the container,  but could not read the pressure.

The gauge was a 15psig fuel pressure gauge which I modified to be a vacuum gauge. In free air, it reads about 15psi. Under full vacuum, it reads 0 PSI. roughly. It's just a fuel gauge, but it lets me check to make sure my jar hasn't sprung a leak.
It's reading around a PSI or a half a PSI, but pressure is probably less than that. About as good as my cheapo HVAC vacuum pump can get.

What is your estimate of the maximum drag force on this system (I.e, drag force at v_max)?

No clue.
But it takes extremely little positive feedback to keep it swinging nicely.
I have not tested yet how long it swings without positive feedback.

33

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 10:35:16 PM »

BTW, it is very easy to demonstrate that things can move faster than the speed of light.

Count me in, I want to see that demonstration.

34

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 10:23:05 PM »

Here's two rocketships racing eachother.
One fires a laser cannon at the other.
Does he have to aim straight at him to hit him, or does he need to fire to where the target will be after the time it takes the light to arrive?

The reason I'm asking is because I think it's indisputable that he has to lead on the target.
And that increases the light path length.
And this means if the earth is racing upwards at 15 trillion trillion times the speed of light, and you shine a flashlight across the room, the light would have a much longer path, and would in fact take a very long time to reach the other side of the room, because the other side of the room would be in a drastically different place in the galaxy by the time the light arrived.

In conclusion, I'm having serious difficulties with UA.

35

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The effect FE has on me

« on: March 11, 2019, 08:11:12 PM »

There is no youtube video to explain north star inclination = latitude, I have looked.

It's worse than thought.

Here's one such video that comes close. The indication here is that since it's 3D projected, any scene can be made available to anyone anywhere, and where you are determines what scene you see:

36

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 07:27:02 PM »

Your acknowledgement of zeteticism is inaccurate.

Interesting. Wiki page you linked to says Samuel Rowbotham used this method, measuring the water convexity, and from that concluded on a shape.
I wonder if he really had no initial theory.

The strength of zeteticism lies in basing one's conclusions on experimentation and observation rather than on an initial theory. Zeteticism removes preconceived notions and biases from the equation.

What does that even really mean?
I mean think about it. We always start with some theory which prompts us to do a specific experiment or observation. That doesn't  rule out the validity of the results of the experiment or the observation.
So I'm really not sure even what you're trying to claim.

But either way, for Mr. Bishop to cite a theory made by a glober as a source to state that "Velocities of light do not add like that" does not sound very zetetic on his part.
Remember? If *you* can't demonstrate it using first principles, *you* shouldn't believe it.

And neither should Mr. Bishop.

But it is very interesting that you say that zeteticism lies in basing one's conclusions on experimentation and observation rather than on an initial theory.
I have seen so much where flat earthers are digging like wolves to try and contort observed reality into their initial theory.

So here's the catch: While Einstein may have been zetetic and measured light and found that it's velocities does not add up that way, Mr. Bishop hasn't.
He didn't read Einstein's book and suddenly realize that light doesn't add up that way, he had a theory that required light to not add up that way, and went and found some possible experiments -- or at least someone else's musings -- which allegedly confirmed the prior theory.

And I'm not even sure Einstein even measured whether the velocities of light add up like that.
And if Albert didn't measure, and Bishop didn't measure -- no experiments done -- then I'm having a hard time seeing it as zetetic for Dr. Bishop to zetetically state that light velocities don't add up that way.

But picture this:
There's two race cars going 50 meters a second. They are 300,000,000 meters apart, but going parallel. On a big flat earth.
One of them shoots a pulsed laser cannon at the other. Right at him.
The only problem is that the light takes a second to get there. And by the time it gets there, the target has moved ahead 50 meters.

But it's a laser so he's not out of bullets yet, he stars aiming further and further forward.
He finds that he has to aim over 50 meters ahead of where his target is, in order for the light to intersect the target.
Now, this distance is actually longer than 300,000,000 meters because it's traversing the long side of a right triangle that is 50 by 300,000,000 meters.

Does the path length of light really not add up like that?

37

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Suggestion to prove/disprove FET

« on: March 11, 2019, 04:53:37 PM »

Would flying directly south to the South Pole from the North Pole then keep flying but this time north back to the North Pole (around the world) not solve this?
I mean, if you can fly around the world pole to pole and back to pole, prove the earth is round?

What I'm finding out is that the belief in a flat earth is not at all based on observations. It cites any observation that at the moment appears to support it, but that's all.

Another person flying pole to pole to pole isn't going to help a bit. He'll just be discounted as a fraud and a shill and paid off by NASA.

The problem has nothing to do with observed reality, it has to do with opinion of uninformed individuals and the money making scams of informed individuals who prey on the former. That's the conspiracy.
(A conspiracy is simply where people conspire together.)

The only way to help the problem is for their to be more and more public exposures to the deception among those profiting from flat earth to make the public aware of the issue so fewer people fall for it.

I have been diligently seeking out the very best evidence that the earth is flat. So far the only thing I'm getting is evidence that it's curved.

I have asked a number of questions which strongly challenge flat earth theory and so far nobody will answer the problem.

So basically you'd have to fly every flat earther around the poles. And even then, many of them would say "Well the GPS lied, I know it said I was at the south pole, but I really was not at the south pole. The earth is still flat."

You have to remember people are used to living in a magic world.

Most people pull a snack from the fridge and warm it up in the microwave. They turn on the lights with a switch. They take a warm shower in the morning. They get in a car and drive to work. They take an elevator ride up to their cubicle. They turn on their computer and do productive work all day like reading this tom foolery. When they get home, they flip on a TV, maybe download their email, play some music on a CD player or mp3 player now days.

But how do any of those machines work? For 99% of the population, it's pure magic. They could not explain it to save their lives. To them, it's pure magic!
When you tell them the earth is flat? They have no way of knowing it's one big prank to make money.

The only way to remedy the problem is for flat earth theory to become more prevalent in films so the masses can become aware of the deception going on. They still aren't going to understand the science, but at least they will know it's not as robust as proponents claim, and in fact has numerous evidences against it and no solid evidence for it.

38

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 04:20:52 PM »

Velocities do not add like that. See the UA page that SeaCritique posted above about Special Relativity.

How did you zetetically  determine that Velocities of light do not add like that?

I will admit that I haven't determined a way to measure how light travel time adds up when there is a massive cross-beam velocity.

However, I zetetically know that when a bumblebee is buzzing around swimming in a puddle, the waves still travel at a constant rate unaffected by the speed of the bumblebee. (As long as he's going slower than the speed of the wave.)
Sure, there's blue shift in front of him and red shift behind him, but the speed of the waves on the water are constant.

so I'll admit that my zetetic abilities are not giving me an absolute solid knowledge of how light behaves differently than all the kinds of waves we can zetetically observe with our own senses.

So I guess the only way this is solved is if the ether is moving with the earth, and that light and radio waves are strictly propagated in the ether, and thus have a short path length.

And what is ether? we pump out all the air from a vacuum jar, and it's still full of ether? We can then accelerate particles to extreme speeds inside that vacuum, and they don't hit the ether?

How do you zetetically know that the ether exists, though?

39

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Observing a Simple Straight Line

« on: March 11, 2019, 04:04:29 PM »

Hello,

I have recently heard about tfes and have one key question if I may and it's to do with the curvature of the earth.

If you stand in say Africa or Ireland or anywhere in the world where there is an opposite continent; if one were to use an accurate and powerful telescope, you should be able to see the coastline of the opposite continent.

If the earth was flat, then a telescope observation between continents would surely prove flat earth.

If the earth was round, then the opposite continent would not be observable due to the curvature of the earth; hence why we observe a horizon when looking out to see.

Why can't we conclude this entire theory with one single telescope looking east to west or west to east across a straight line ?

Best wishes,

X

About the farthest we can see terrestrial objects is perhaps a hundred miles or so, on the best of days.

But still, the earth is supposed to dip down over 6500 feet in 100 miles. So if the earth is really curved as NASA says, a 6500 foot mountain 100 miles away should appear right at eyelevel  for someone at sea level.
(Actually, terrestrial refraction is supposed to cause things to appear higher than they are at the rate of 1 degree per every 932 miles.)

I got plans to photo document measuring alleged mountain dip at 75 and 100 miles since those seem to be two really nice distances.
Also got plans of measuring alleged horizon dip from up on a mountain.
Also got plans to check for horizon curve by holding up a taught string horizontally.

And since you asked about a simple straight line, I got another idea.
I can get 2km of slightly buoyant 100 pound strength floating fishline off amazon for $60. Right now the budget isn't any more cooperative with that than the weather.
But I intend to string this line out and stretch it to a hundred pounds of tension - just under the surface of a lake on a calm morning.

The if the earth is curved, the water should bulge up between the endpoints by about 3 inches.

This experiment is exceptionally interesting to me because it doesn't rely on atmospheric issues or any long-range optical properties. It's just the string and the water. And everybody knows water seeks level.

40

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Gravity

« on: March 11, 2019, 03:38:13 PM »

The Flat Earth Society's Wiki page about "Universal Acceleration" is worth a read.

However it should be noted that upward acceleration is not universally accepted because a major point for many flat earthers is that the earth is stationary and in fact many flat earthers totally ridicule globers for claiming that "The earth is hurtling through space at a thousand miles an hour..."

UA of course requires that the earth is now going trillions and trillions of times faster than the speed of light.

I'm still struggling with this because it sort of requires light to have mass and well I'm not sure how to explain it.
But let's say you  are shining a flashlight horizontally across a room.
That's what, 15 feet? Well how far did the light travel?
During the time it took it to travel that 15 feet horizontally, it also traveled 15 trillion trillion feet up, or whatever. So theoretically it would take a lot longer to get across the room.

The wiki sub section on terminal velocity seems rather odd to me. It gets all confused, forgetting that terminal velocity is related to the resistance of the medium (i.e. air/water) through which the weight is falling.
It would be exactly the same with gravity or UA.