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Flat Earth Investigations / Re: What Would You Do?
« on: October 10, 2018, 12:29:39 AM »
All I would need to decide would be a plum bob and a scale to weigh myself. If the earth were a disk then the gravitational field would be much different than it would be for a sphere. The gravitational force is a vector. That vector is pointed towards the center of gravity. A sphere has it's center of gravity at the center of the sphere so the gravitational vector is always normal to the surface and would be the same anywhere. Of course there are small variations on the earths surface because the density of the earth is not totally uniform, but the variations are relatively small. If the world were a flat disk, then the center of gravity would be at the center of the disk. To see the effect just take a plate and try to balance it on your finger. The only place that would happen is in the center of the plate. If the center of the earth disk happened to be in Omaha then the gravity force vector would be straight down at that point. You would expect a plum bob to hang straight down at that point as well. If you took the plum bob to near the edge, the force of gravity would fall off and the plum bob would hang at an angle to the surface of the earth an tend in the direction of Omaha. Additionally, the force would be less because you are farther from the center of mass. The gravitational force depends on the masses involved and the distance to the centers of both masses. It wouldn't be all that bad to live on a flat disk earth. If the doctor said that you needed to loose weight all you would have to do is move farther out toward the edge of the disk and you would weigh less. Of course you would also tend to walk at an angle because the force of gravity would also pull you towards the center of mass. Given enough cycles of evolution the human species could develop people with different length legs to compensate. Unfortunately that would mean some people would only be able to walk in a circle clockwise and others counter clockwise. I think that I would prefer the spherical world myself. How about you?