Adrenoch

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #40 on: March 25, 2019, 10:58:48 AM »
It's weird. I worked with about 200 physicists, geologists, biologists, chemists, and about every other "ist" you can think of for the better part of 20 years, every day at a research institution. I worked with colleagues at other such institutions around the U.S. as well, and the behaviour you're saying has infected modern science, never occurred. (ETA: I shouldn't have said it "never occurred" because I couldn't know that. I should have said the daily behavior I witnessed of the researchers does not fit with the behavior you've said is part of modern science.)

There are two possibilities for why FE theories aren't gaining traction:
1. The scientific community is either incompetent or deceitful, or
2. Your evidence isn't as good as you think it is

These were the same two points that came up every time I'd get a call or email from a creationist, or an expanding Earther, or people who feared vaccines, or who believed in alternate geological timelines, or that we never went to the moon, or any of about a dozen other ideas. They always knew, with absolute certainty, that they were right. And that meant the only reason the scientific community didn't accept their findings, was because of #1. It was never #2.

If you approach a scientist and try to convince them the Earth is flat, yes, they're going to dismiss you. Probably not for the reasons you might think. But if you approach a scientist with an experiment that was done excruciatingly carefully and documented excruciatingly well, which says that a laser met three posts across five miles at the same height, you're going to pique their interest because it goes against expectations. All I'm trying to do is help you eliminate #2 as the problem.

Of all the "alternate science" proponents I'd talked to over the years, only one actually decided to go out and get the hard data. All the rest scoffed and said their existing experiments were proof enough. The problem was always #1. The one other guy? He spent $3,500 of his own money collecting actual data (yes, I've always felt bad about that). The hard data didn't say what he expected.

I'm never going to convince you modern science isn't keeping good flat Earth science locked out. We both know that's not going to happen. I'm just hoping you'll do enough good science yourself to either convince yourself your evidence isn't as good as you thought, or to convince a single scientist that there is a mystery about the Earth's curvature to be re-examined. Either way, you win.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2019, 12:15:10 PM by Adrenoch »

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #41 on: March 25, 2019, 12:55:18 PM »
I'm never going to convince you modern science isn't keeping good flat Earth science locked out.
None of the flaws I've said are specific to academia dealing with FET. In the modern era, the response to a breathtaking new discovery is to append, not to replace.

Let's walk through your example. Again, I don't think it will have the result you're claiming, but that's not the point. I perform this experiment, I even manage to get it published, scientists all around the world see and even believe the data on this new bedford level-esque experiment. Even if it is conceded that that would happen, the community at large might:
1. Brush it aside and ignore it.
2. Pay attention to it, analyze it, shoehorn in some explanation of light interacting with a dark matter temperature inversion or some such and use it to add more and more to the existing model, test a few dozen hypotheses until one happens to be in line with something by force of numbers, take that as the accepted explanation.
3. Start questioning whether the Earth was round.

The goal here is to reach 3, I am claiming they will do 2. Are there any objections so far? And if not, how might we reach 3?
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

manicminer

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #42 on: March 25, 2019, 01:01:35 PM »
Quote
We know our own models, we know those of others far better than roundies seem to.

The difference is that there is only one RE model.  Notice the use of the singular there. We don't need more than one model to explain everything we see in nature. 

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #43 on: March 25, 2019, 01:20:58 PM »
Quote
We know our own models, we know those of others far better than roundies seem to.

The difference is that there is only one RE model.  Notice the use of the singular there. We don't need more than one model to explain everything we see in nature.
You think that's a strength? All you're left with is the hope that someone didn't slip up centuries back and everything you've built isn't just hasty overcorrection.
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

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Offline WellRoundedIndividual

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #44 on: March 25, 2019, 01:42:20 PM »
Are you suggesting that multiple flat earth models IS a strength? All I see from this is a cult of personality. Everyone who claims they have their own model of the flat earth thinks they are some great scientist akin to the alchemist who claims to have turned lead into gold. What good does that do the FE movement when your own members are going to tear your model down? Until you have a unified flat earth theory with solid mathematical proofs behind all of the mechanisms FE claims exists, all you have is a bunch of unverifiable claims. You can continue to make whatever wild assertions you want. Its the wild west of science.

So you're claim that RE having one model is a weakness is ridiculous. Try again.
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Offline markjo

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #45 on: March 25, 2019, 01:43:31 PM »
Quote
We know our own models, we know those of others far better than roundies seem to.

The difference is that there is only one RE model.  Notice the use of the singular there. We don't need more than one model to explain everything we see in nature.
You think that's a strength? All you're left with is the hope that someone didn't slip up centuries back and everything you've built isn't just hasty overcorrection.
Yes, a single RE model is a strength because it means that the model has stood the test of time and scrutiny.  That single RE model is constantly being validated by almost every branch of the earth sciences.
Abandon hope all ye who press enter here.

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -- Charles Darwin

If you can't demonstrate it, then you shouldn't believe it.

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #46 on: March 25, 2019, 01:56:27 PM »
Are you suggesting that multiple flat earth models IS a strength? All I see from this is a cult of personality. Everyone who claims they have their own model of the flat earth thinks they are some great scientist akin to the alchemist who claims to have turned lead into gold. What good does that do the FE movement when your own members are going to tear your model down? Until you have a unified flat earth theory with solid mathematical proofs behind all of the mechanisms FE claims exists, all you have is a bunch of unverifiable claims. You can continue to make whatever wild assertions you want. Its the wild west of science.

So you're claim that RE having one model is a weakness is ridiculous. Try again.
So it's a cult of personality... because we disagree? A cult of personality would better describe following one solitary path and listening to whatever those people said, making their names synonymous with genius rather than just mere contributors to a greater whole.
FET instead acknowledges we are human. We don't worship scientists and follow their words blindly, assume that they must be holy and accurate and truthful, it's slower going particularly when there's active sabotage, but it is by far a better way to do science as it means we don't neglect whole possibilities just because they're different.

Quote
We know our own models, we know those of others far better than roundies seem to.

The difference is that there is only one RE model.  Notice the use of the singular there. We don't need more than one model to explain everything we see in nature.
You think that's a strength? All you're left with is the hope that someone didn't slip up centuries back and everything you've built isn't just hasty overcorrection.
Yes, a single RE model is a strength because it means that the model has stood the test of time and scrutiny.  That single RE model is constantly being validated by almost every branch of the earth sciences.
No, it means you tweak and nip and tuck constantly to shoehorn anything new into the established framework rather than see what might genuinely be best at explaining it. It's not validated by anything, the first plane wasn't invented by a theoretician building from scratch, it was made by trial and error of people who took inspiration but otherwise worked solely with what they saw with their own eyes, and created a whole discipline by direct experimentation that later got shoved into the mainstream with all the assumptions that entails, when it worked independently. Practical, applied science does not validate theory, at best the theory is inspiration.

There are two kinds of experimental results. One, where the experiment informs the theory and the result gets added to find a constant/adjust a parameter. Two, where the experiment matches with a prediction, something that could be achieved by force of numbers. That's all there is to science. It's not about certainty, it's never been meant to be. That's just how cults treat it.
Clinging to one model and disregarding alternatives is the bane of any scientific endeavour.
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

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Offline WellRoundedIndividual

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #47 on: March 25, 2019, 02:07:02 PM »
I certainly don't worship scientists. I personally can't stand Neil or Bill Nye (the two most popular ones). I speak only for myself. I am an educated and degreed engineer. I understand how science is supposed to work. I ask questions. I do not accept everything verbatim. I read scientific articles all the time because I like to see what is going on out in the scientific realm. Do I believe everything I read? No.
BobLawBlah.

Adrenoch

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #48 on: March 25, 2019, 02:30:48 PM »
None of the flaws I've said are specific to academia dealing with FET. In the modern era, the response to a breathtaking new discovery is to append, not to replace.

Agreed. Because if you have 1,000 observations that can be explained by Theory X, and then you have a new observation that doesn't seem to fit, you can either A) see if there might be something you missed in Theory X that, if corrected, can now explain 1,001 observations, or B) create Theory Y that can re-explain the first 1,000 observations as well as the new one.

Science will always start with modifying existing theories because it's a smaller lift than rebuilding everything currently known. If that doesn't work, then it is forced to build a new theory.

Let's walk through your example. Again, I don't think it will have the result you're claiming, but that's not the point. I perform this experiment, I even manage to get it published, scientists all around the world see and even believe the data on this new bedford level-esque experiment. Even if it is conceded that that would happen, the community at large might:
1. Brush it aside and ignore it.
2. Pay attention to it, analyze it, shoehorn in some explanation of light interacting with a dark matter temperature inversion or some such and use it to add more and more to the existing model, test a few dozen hypotheses until one happens to be in line with something by force of numbers, take that as the accepted explanation.
3. Start questioning whether the Earth was round.

The goal here is to reach 3, I am claiming they will do 2. Are there any objections so far? And if not, how might we reach 3?

What you're outlining in #2 is revealing what I think is the underlying fallacy in your understanding of how the scientific process works.

You said, "test a few dozen hypotheses until one happens to be in line with something by force of numbers, take that as the accepted explanation." Yes, you start testing your hypotheses, and the ones that fail, get discarded. That leaves you with the ones that didn't fail, and as newer ideas and better equipment comes around each year, you test them until they fail and get discarded. All the while, you're probably coming up with some new hypotheses, testing them, and discarding some. When you hit a hypothesis that keeps passing every test you throw at it, it starts gaining more weight.

It's not a game of tweaking esoteric equations to make things just damn fit. It's predictions each hypothesis generates that gets tested.

As an example: The biggest question in physics is how to reconcile general relativity with quantum physics. We know they both can't be right, but they are both amazingly good at predicting what our experiments will find. String theory actually solved this conundrum for us - BUT, string theory doesn't generate any meaningful predictions. The math definitely lines up, but there's no way for us to disprove the hypothesis. So now, string theory is losing its luster and researchers are looking at other avenues. So it's not about the math just working and then scientists say, "Okay, that one works. Let's just go with that."

If you did solid research that showed an apparent lack of curvature over a 5-mile stretch, scientists would say, "That doesn't fit with all the other experiments I've seen that show the opposite. What's going on here?" They might say, "It's refraction," but you would already have thought of the top ten objections because you would have done research before you designed the experiment in order to account for something as obvious as refraction. Another researcher would say, "It's due to phenomenon ABC," and you'd figure out how to account for that and do the experiment again. In the meantime, other scientists would be wondering what's going on and would start trying to reproduce your experiment for themselves. If it keeps holding up, they'll start trying to disprove it by looking at some of its immediately testable predictions and setting up new experiments.

If it holds up under everything they throw at it, then they'll start trying to understand if there's a new phenomenon happening. They'll keep backing it up until they reach a point where math and hypotheses and observations all start to mesh again. That may very well mean backing all the way up to a flat Earth. That would be a very long way to back up, however, because as I mentioned earlier, physics itself would have to be gutted and rebuilt.

So it's not a single step from doing the experiment to the world accepting a flat Earth, which is why it hasn't happened yet. It takes an experiment done with extreme rigor that shows a lack of curvature, then legions of researchers trying to replicate, disprove, and enhance your experiment, then a process of tearing down every bit of conflicting science that is less certain than your evidence, and a new theory with new predictions that starts getting tested. That's a stunning amount of work that would need to be done just to break down the current paradigm, let alone build a new one that leads to the conclusion you're hoping for. It would likely take a decade at minimum since so many sciences would be affected.

With all that said, you can see why an experiment that would set all these wheels in motion absolutely has to be impeccable. Fortunately, there are a lot of simple curvature experiments that can be done inexpensively and with a great deal of precision.

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Offline WellRoundedIndividual

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #49 on: March 25, 2019, 02:43:06 PM »
For an example of scientists discarding something that was wrong:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028133-200-rewriting-the-textbooks-einsteins-cosmological-fudge/

Its ok to admit that we are wrong. Scientists go back to the drawing board all the time. It is the uneducated public that thinks that science is immutable.
BobLawBlah.

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #50 on: March 25, 2019, 05:03:23 PM »
Agreed. Because if you have 1,000 observations that can be explained by Theory X, and then you have a new observation that doesn't seem to fit, you can either A) see if there might be something you missed in Theory X that, if corrected, can now explain 1,001 observations, or B) create Theory Y that can re-explain the first 1,000 observations as well as the new one.
...
You said, "test a few dozen hypotheses until one happens to be in line with something by force of numbers, take that as the accepted explanation." Yes, you start testing your hypotheses, and the ones that fail, get discarded. That leaves you with the ones that didn't fail, and as newer ideas and better equipment comes around each year, you test them until they fail and get discarded. All the while, you're probably coming up with some new hypotheses, testing them, and discarding some. When you hit a hypothesis that keeps passing every test you throw at it, it starts gaining more weight.

It's not a game of tweaking esoteric equations to make things just damn fit. It's predictions each hypothesis generates that gets tested.
...
If it holds up under everything they throw at it, then they'll start trying to understand if there's a new phenomenon happening. They'll keep backing it up until they reach a point where math and hypotheses and observations all start to mesh again. That may very well mean backing all the way up to a flat Earth. That would be a very long way to back up, however, because as I mentioned earlier, physics itself would have to be gutted and rebuilt.
The problem here is the bias towards modifying theory X. It's easy for errors to snowball in this system because there will always be a modification. There is nothing that would possibly make them back up all the way to the shape of the Earth because they'd just tweak something or add a new constant long before they got there. Creating a hypothesis to explain something, just appending it to a larger model, is trivial. If it gets lucky because it's tangentially related to what's really going on/just lucky in general because there were enough guesses that one had to be force of numbers and validates a prediction, later experiments would then be used to iron out the kinks calculate the constants in the mathematical description etc. Einstein didn't derive the speed of light in his work, he used the value arrived at by experimentation.
Familiarity wins out. By the time enough had been written to potentially make them question more, some hypothesis for the first experiment would be an accepted part of RET and it would no longer count as evidence against.

Yep, creating a theory Y takes much more work, and that's not going to happen in the current climate. They just modify, tweak, nothing will ever make them backtrack 1000 questions and so starting from the ground-up to develop something with half as much rigour is not something there is any incentive or interest in doing. You are stuck with modifying and praying the work of a few people centuries ago with far worse resources and understanding was accurate. It's only going to be possible if science lacked a central model. Applied science is its own thing, concerned with application and experiment, but as far as explaining why anything happens that needs to be open. It should never have been consolidated.

Quote
With all that said, you can see why an experiment that would set all these wheels in motion absolutely has to be impeccable. Fortunately, there are a lot of simple curvature experiments that can be done inexpensively and with a great deal of precision.
This is the problem with how you're thinking about it. It's not a curvature experiment, it's a light experiment. This approach is basically scientific tunnel vision, which is the whole problem.

But again, like you pointed out lofty speeches on the ideals of science are something we're apparently not going to agree on, that was why I tried to have a discussion on the practicalities. Walk through what actually happened with small steps that can't reasonably be questioned.
Goal: cause debate on the shape of the Earth through modern academia.
Current stage: a paper published on your curvature experiment, assuming it's believed, and accounting for all known objections. Modifications to RET were proposed to account for it and tested, by force of numbers some passed initial tests until one pulled through and is considered broadly speaking accurate.
What do I do now?


For an example of scientists discarding something that was wrong:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028133-200-rewriting-the-textbooks-einsteins-cosmological-fudge/

Its ok to admit that we are wrong. Scientists go back to the drawing board all the time. It is the uneducated public that thinks that science is immutable.
If it's ok to admit that you're wrong, why are you repeating points I've already addressed several times over, and more than that completely contradicting yourself?
That's not discarding something wrong, that's a minor modification to a still-accepted model. And your centralized science relies on it being immutable, if the central tenets get questioned you lose everything.
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

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Offline WellRoundedIndividual

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #51 on: March 25, 2019, 05:16:54 PM »
I never said it wasnt ok to admit you were wrong. Where am I contradicting myself? I have said the same thing multiple times - that scientists work through the proofs of their theory with a set of assumptions. If that result does not match observation/measurement, they go back to the drawing board.

The scientific community is not afraid of being proven wrong. This happens all the time.  Results get scrutinized. Some scientists get disgraced. Some get corrected.
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Offline markjo

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #52 on: March 25, 2019, 05:27:00 PM »
Clinging to one model and disregarding alternatives is the bane of any scientific endeavour.
We "cling" to the model that works the best, and so far that's the RE model.  If you want to change that, then you will need to prove that your model works better.
Abandon hope all ye who press enter here.

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -- Charles Darwin

If you can't demonstrate it, then you shouldn't believe it.

Adrenoch

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #53 on: March 25, 2019, 06:43:57 PM »
The problem here is the bias towards modifying theory X. It's easy for errors to snowball in this system because there will always be a modification.

You are stuck with modifying and praying the work of a few people centuries ago with far worse resources and understanding was accurate.

You seem to be suggesting that science builds on conclusions of the past, but never revisits or retests or re-evaluates those conclusions. That's patently false. Einstein and general relativity superseding Newton is a simple answer. Newton came up with the math that was incredibly accurate in predicting the motion of the planets. But Einstein came up with something completely different and it made a prediction about how certain orbits would act based on some extreme examples. When we checked those orbits, we realized Einstein's model was a lot closer than Newton's even though Einstein's makes far less intuitive sense. We had to reconstruct everything we thought we knew about what space and time are. It was a huge teardown.

This is the problem with how you're thinking about it. It's not a curvature experiment, it's a light experiment. This approach is basically scientific tunnel vision, which is the whole problem.

I don't follow. Normally, science proceeds by working meticulously with a very narrow focus to explain a single observation. Enough of them build up to force larger changes in theories. Are you saying you want to do something different?

But again, like you pointed out lofty speeches on the ideals of science are something we're apparently not going to agree on, that was why I tried to have a discussion on the practicalities. Walk through what actually happened with small steps that can't reasonably be questioned.
Goal: cause debate on the shape of the Earth through modern academia.
Current stage: a paper published on your curvature experiment, assuming it's believed, and accounting for all known objections. Modifications to RET were proposed to account for it and tested, by force of numbers some passed initial tests until one pulled through and is considered broadly speaking accurate.
What do I do now?

Maybe this is the crux of the whole issue. Why is your goal to cause debate on the shape of the Earth? Shouldn't it be to find the truth, regardless of whether it causes debate about the shape of the Earth?

And I still think you're under a misunderstanding about "force of numbers" as you put it. Any modification to a theory still has to accurately fit the 1,000 previous observations as well as the new one. It's not like just making up a new formula or something to get you out of a jam. The modification to the theory has to explain every other observation at least as well as the old theory did. If it doesn't, then it's time to do some tearing down.

You seem to be suggesting that science just sees new things and tries to shoehorn them into what's already known because that's just what's easiest. If it doesn't explain the observations, it's no good, and nobody wants to dedicate their life and career to something they know is fruitless and erroneous.

To use dark matter as an example: When we found galaxies were rotating fast enough that the gravity of the visible stars wouldn't have been enough to keep the galaxies together, the first thing everyone asked was is there something wrong with our understanding of gravity. But we have an exhaustive amount of data on gravity that checks out. We use our calculations to send probes across the solar system with tremendous precision based on gravity. We can see with minute precision how satellites act in orbit. We see gravitational lensing exactly the way Einstein predicted we would. Everything we knew about gravity checked out.

So if not gravity, maybe we were counting the stars wrong. So they had several teams do the counting. They all came up the same, using different methods. That checked out.

Maybe galaxies were much younger than we thought. But if that were the case, how come we could we see stars in those galaxies that were seriously old? If we got the age of stars wrong, then our grasp of physics must be wrong, but the physics checks out in extreme detail in 100,000 other observations, so it's not likely that we've got that wrong either.

It went on and on like that, until the most likely possibility was that we're not seeing a huge amount of mass in the universe. It wasn't a snap decision by any stretch, and dark matter is still only a hypothesis. But we re-examined everything that that one set of observations conflicted with - as you would say, we re-examined most of the pillar. So it absolutely does happen.

As I said before, either the scientific community is too biased because they're incompetent or dishonest, or the arguments FE'ers are putting forward are nowhere near as solid as they think they are. I don't think I can convince you of the former, but I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong on the latter.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2019, 07:37:57 PM by Adrenoch »

Adrenoch

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #54 on: March 25, 2019, 08:07:06 PM »
I just realized I answered you poorly, and in a much more long-winded way than necessary.

Goal: cause debate on the shape of the Earth through modern academia.

This should not be your goal. Your goal should be to discover something new, regardless of whether it agrees with your position or not. But regardless...

Current stage: a paper published on your curvature experiment, assuming it's believed, and accounting for all known objections. Modifications to RET were proposed to account for it and tested

So far, so good.

, by force of numbers some passed initial tests until one pulled through

There's no "by force of numbers." If you were to do the laser test and others confirmed your findings, then there would have to be a new hypothesis about why this experiment goes against expectations. New hypotheses would arise, and each of those would generate a prediction. You and/or others would then test those hypotheses. Most will be falsified. Some might shed light on other things we thought were pretty well known, and we'd have to re-examine those. Maybe you'd have discovered an entirely new phenomenon. Maybe it could be explained by a small adjustment of the current theory. Or maybe an entirely new theory would be required.

and is considered broadly speaking accurate.
What do I do now?

Rejoice in the fact that you just added to the sum of human knowledge for all eternity!

But you're actually asking, "If my observation can be fully explained by only a small addition to the current body of knowledge, how do I get people to rethink the global Earth?"

If your aim is to cause scientific debate about the global Earth, you would have to do another impeccable experiment. Maybe that breaks it wide open, or maybe it just adds to the general body of knowledge. But hey, at least you'd then have two really solid experiments that can also point toward a flat Earth. You do more experiments. Maybe sometimes you revisit an old experiment of yours and show that the new accepted explanation fails under your new experiment, and then everyone will scramble to put the pieces back together in a meaningful order. Eventually, you may get enough experiments that the most likely explanation for your observations and everyone else's is that the Earth must be flat.

But you must also be prepared for the possibility that your experiments may be completely incompatible with a Flat Earth model, and you'd have to be a big enough person to recognize when/if that happens.

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #55 on: March 25, 2019, 09:27:28 PM »
You seem to be suggesting that science builds on conclusions of the past, but never revisits or retests or re-evaluates those conclusions. That's patently false. Einstein and general relativity superseding Newton is a simple answer. Newton came up with the math that was incredibly accurate in predicting the motion of the planets. But Einstein came up with something completely different and it made a prediction about how certain orbits would act based on some extreme examples. When we checked those orbits, we realized Einstein's model was a lot closer than Newton's even though Einstein's makes far less intuitive sense. We had to reconstruct everything we thought we knew about what space and time are. It was a huge teardown.
It really wasn't. It was a massive addition. Newton and Newton's understanding is still used today. A teardown would be the transition from the caloric theory of heat to the mechanical, say, the caloric theory isn't used because it was rejected as wrong. That'd be over a century ago.
Einstein should have been a teardown, if scientific institutes worked properly. Like dark matter and many such things, something new and fundamental is discovered about the world, let's take it back now that we know space is more than an abstract dimension, or that we know there is mass not detected by anything other than its gravitational signature, let's change things based on that; nothing happens. Einstein at least offered the transit of Mercury, though it wasn't a teardown as there was no good answer to that, dark matter didn't impact, say, the field of composition of the Earth as we discovered it had more mass than current models indicated, because excuses are always made for why those things don't apply.

Quote
This is the problem with how you're thinking about it. It's not a curvature experiment, it's a light experiment. This approach is basically scientific tunnel vision, which is the whole problem.
I don't follow. Normally, science proceeds by working meticulously with a very narrow focus to explain a single observation. Enough of them build up to force larger changes in theories. Are you saying you want to do something different?
Because you want the result to point to curvature of the Earth rather than a property of light. There is no such thing as impeccable evidence precisely because of this, this experiment's results can be explained either with with reference to either option. It's excessive focus on one option to the exclusion of another.

Quote
Maybe this is the crux of the whole issue. Why is your goal to cause debate on the shape of the Earth? Shouldn't it be to find the truth, regardless of whether it causes debate about the shape of the Earth?
Because we're talking in this thread, and you've said science should be open to the idea. If that is the case, let's show it. Suppose we live on a flat Earth with the result of the curvature experiment you wanted, could academia ever acknowledge that?

There's no "by force of numbers." If you were to do the laser test and others confirmed your findings, then there would have to be a new hypothesis about why this experiment goes against expectations. New hypotheses would arise, and each of those would generate a prediction. You and/or others would then test those hypotheses. Most will be falsified. Some might shed light on other things we thought were pretty well known, and we'd have to re-examine those. Maybe you'd have discovered an entirely new phenomenon. Maybe it could be explained by a small adjustment of the current theory. Or maybe an entirely new theory would be required.
Like your dark matter example, that is exactly what I mean. Propose enough hypotheses and one will pass its tests. That is the case regardless of whether it's true. It is just force of numbers, throw enough things at the wall and something will stick, they will always be able to invent a hypothesis that explains the observation, and either is close enough to appealing to the right principles, or is just straight-up lucky, that it passes the possible tests. Nothing is ever going to make that not the case. Look at the caloric theory of heat again for a good example; the carnot cycle, still used today, was developed from it, as well as accurate predictions of the speed of sound. The theory itself is still accepted as wrong, but the predictions it made are still valid.

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But you're actually asking, "If my observation can be fully explained by only a small addition to the current body of knowledge, how do I get people to rethink the global Earth?"

If your aim is to cause scientific debate about the global Earth, you would have to do another impeccable experiment. Maybe that breaks it wide open, or maybe it just adds to the general body of knowledge. But hey, at least you'd then have two really solid experiments that can also point toward a flat Earth. You do more experiments. Maybe sometimes you revisit an old experiment of yours and show that the new accepted explanation fails under your new experiment, and then everyone will scramble to put the pieces back together in a meaningful order. Eventually, you may get enough experiments that the most likely explanation for your observations and everyone else's is that the Earth must be flat.
Except by the time I perform a second, the first will be viewed as pointing to RET because they'd have a theory. If I question it, they'd refine or replace said theory. So I'd only have one experiment, and the same would happen to it.
And equally, given that RET will propose an explanation for literally anything pointed out so that a point in time after such an experiment will have it looking as accepted a part of science as gravity decreasing with the inverse square law, for example, surely it follows it's sufficient to show that the most likely explanation for observations now is that the Earth is flat?
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

Adrenoch

Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #56 on: March 25, 2019, 10:39:00 PM »
Well, I'm really sorry about how you feel about the state of science today. You've got a terrific model that both explains why science doesn't agree the Earth is flat despite your being confident it is, and it also absolves you of doing any real experimentation because it would be a fruitless exercise. It allows you to assume you're correct while removing the requirement to prove it.

Be well, and I hope you get a chance to do some solid experiments someday because no matter the results, you'll probably benefit.

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #57 on: March 26, 2019, 05:26:10 PM »
Well, I'm really sorry about how you feel about the state of science today. You've got a terrific model that both explains why science doesn't agree the Earth is flat despite your being confident it is, and it also absolves you of doing any real experimentation because it would be a fruitless exercise. It allows you to assume you're correct while removing the requirement to prove it.
And when you see all my explanations and you decide that's the motivating factor, can you seriously blame me?
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.

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Offline markjo

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #58 on: March 26, 2019, 06:30:01 PM »
Well, I'm really sorry about how you feel about the state of science today. You've got a terrific model that both explains why science doesn't agree the Earth is flat despite your being confident it is, and it also absolves you of doing any real experimentation because it would be a fruitless exercise. It allows you to assume you're correct while removing the requirement to prove it.
And when you see all my explanations and you decide that's the motivating factor, can you seriously blame me?
If you feel that the foundations (or pillars) of modern science are so shaky, then what experiments would you propose in order to test them to your satisfaction?
Abandon hope all ye who press enter here.

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -- Charles Darwin

If you can't demonstrate it, then you shouldn't believe it.

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Offline JRowe

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Re: Your Path to FE
« Reply #59 on: March 26, 2019, 07:12:39 PM »
Well, I'm really sorry about how you feel about the state of science today. You've got a terrific model that both explains why science doesn't agree the Earth is flat despite your being confident it is, and it also absolves you of doing any real experimentation because it would be a fruitless exercise. It allows you to assume you're correct while removing the requirement to prove it.
And when you see all my explanations and you decide that's the motivating factor, can you seriously blame me?
If you feel that the foundations (or pillars) of modern science are so shaky, then what experiments would you propose in order to test them to your satisfaction?
You could just take a look at how it treats new discoveries, talk to a few scientists and mention disagreeing, see how quickly they act like experts on models they know nothing about...
The way the scientific method is applied by academia just causes tradition to hold sway. That's my objection. If you want to talk tests of FET, that's a whole other matter. My go-to example would be measuring the continuity of the rate of change of gravity in the vertical direction.
My DE model explained here.
Open to questions, but if you're curious start there rather than expecting me to explain it all from scratch every time.