[retiredAstrophysicist]

Hi folks - As my moniker suggests, I'm a retired astrophysicist, well-traveled and with many observations "with my own eyes" over my career. Together with several other retired astrophysicists and other scientists, we present programs for the public at the Planetarium belonging to the Los Alamos Nature Center, in Los Alamos, New Mexico (home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory). Of course we all regard the Flat Earth Model as a joke. Nevertheless, it has been brought to our attention that a growing number of people adhere to this fallacy, and we would therefore like to hold a discussion on the topic.

We think the most appropriate time for such a discussion will be Sunday 1 April 2018. Since none of us could present the arguments for a Flat Earth Model with a straight face, we were wondering if any member of the society would be willing to join us to present your case. Because Los Alamos is a highly scientifically literate community, you might expect to field questions of a fairly complex nature, for example regarding Foucault's Pendulum, occultations of stars by the moon (also eclipse prediction, of course), and trans-oceanic tsunami propagation. The latter case is similar to the long-distance flight problem that I've seen discussed in these pages, but doesn't involve recruiting airline companies and pilots into a fictitious conspiracy.

Our Planetarium is run by a nonprofit organization, and we can therefore not afford to pay transportation costs, but we would be glad to offer a meal beforehand and a beer afterwards from our local brewery. Treat this in good fun; we do not intend to hurl insults or indulge in name-calling. Our mission is public education, pure and simple.

Thanks for your attention.

[Tom Bishop]

If I go over there you will just get schooled more badly than you do here. At least here you have the chance to google up some ancient hypothesis and insist that it is fact.

[juner]

Hi folks - As my moniker suggests, I'm a retired astrophysicist, well-traveled and with many observations "with my own eyes" over my career. Together with several other retired astrophysicists and other scientists, we present programs for the public at the Planetarium belonging to the Los Alamos Nature Center, in Los Alamos, New Mexico (home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory). Of course we all regard the Flat Earth Model as a joke. Nevertheless, it has been brought to our attention that a growing number of people adhere to this fallacy, and we would therefore like to hold a discussion on the topic.

We think the most appropriate time for such a discussion will be Sunday 1 April 2018. Since none of us could present the arguments for a Flat Earth Model with a straight face, we were wondering if any member of the society would be willing to join us to present your case. Because Los Alamos is a highly scientifically literate community, you might expect to field questions of a fairly complex nature, for example regarding Foucault's Pendulum, occultations of stars by the moon (also eclipse prediction, of course), and trans-oceanic tsunami propagation. The latter case is similar to the long-distance flight problem that I've seen discussed in these pages, but doesn't involve recruiting airline companies and pilots into a fictitious conspiracy.

Our Planetarium is run by a nonprofit organization, and we can therefore not afford to pay transportation costs, but we would be glad to offer a meal beforehand and a beer afterwards from our local brewery. Treat this in good fun; we do not intend to hurl insults or indulge in name-calling. Our mission is public education, pure and simple.

Thanks for your attention.

This is a rather interesting proposal. Can you provide some sources or references to verify your role and a confirmation this will take place. Holding it on April 1 seems a bit suspicious.

[mtnman]

If I go over there you will just get schooled more badly than you do here. At least here you have the chance to google up some ancient hypothesis and insist that it is fact.

Does that mean you are accepting his invitation?

Sounds like an interesting event.

[retiredAstrophysicist]

[/quote]

This is a rather interesting proposal. Can you provide some sources or references to verify your role and a confirmation this will take place. Holding it on April 1 seems a bit suspicious.
[/quote]

The idea of holding such a discussion was suggested to me by a colleague at the Planetarium. I was reluctant to do this; holding a public discussion on bad science is a disservice to good science. When the idea of holding it on April Fools Day was mooted, I assented, and volunteered to make inquiries. Because the Flat Earth Model and essentially all of modern science are mutually exclusive, one of us will turn out to be a Fool. Nevertheless, we will reward ourselves with good beer afterwards.

As to a confirmation that this will take place, I cannot yet offer one. We plan our programs at the Planetarium quarter-by-quarter, and will meet to discuss the April - June quarter some time in January. As I said, I don't think we can do a good job with the discussion unless we have someone prepared to defend the Flat Earth Model against some rather difficult questions. If one of you sincerely wants to do this, we should probably have an offline discussion to make sure you have studied the issues carefully. Astronomy, we feel, is your weakest point. The "waffle" about stars in your Cosmos page on the Wiki simply won't cut it. If we don't find someone to skillfully defend the Flat Earth Model, the event won't take place. It's as simple as that.

You can find the website for our planetarium at peecnature.org/events/planetarium. I am one of the presenters mentioned on that page. I won't tell you my name at this moment, but will give you some hints. PhD University of Cambridge 1976 astrophysics. Postdocs at the University of Leiden and Kitt Peak National Observatory. Staff scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The bulk of my career was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and subsequently at the University of Oslo.

[devils advocate]

Holding it on April 1 seems a bit suspicious.

I agree Junker. It's almost as if they don't take the idea of flat earth seriously.

Plus who has time on a Sunday for this type of debate, why not Sat 31st, I mean they mention Beers afterwards, ON a SUNDAY! With people having to work next day, no no no, let's make it Saturday dudes, I'll fly over and we'll make a night of it science style!

[Pete Svarrior]

So, Bob. I'm going to call you Bob. You sound like a Bob.

Bob, you suffer from the same strain of arrogance as many academics, especially those with a bit of British education in them. You think we're wrong - fine. You're bloody damn sure we're wrong - fine. You're convinced that, having peer-reviewed the evidence available, we're completely wrong about everything ever - and that's also fine. But what you clearly don't understand is the damage you're doing to your own cause.

First of all: Bob, if you want to invite someone to debate you, no matter how insane you may perceive them as, it is not a good idea to write multiple paragraphs about how all you intend to do is take the Mickey. Combining this with a half-hearted sentence about how you mean no harm is extremely unconvincing. Now, if you're doing this to deliberately sabotage your "efforts" in setting up the event - fair enough. I understand that you don't want to be doing this, but perhaps it'd be better to show some integrity and just tell your colleagues that you're unwilling?

Secondly: you say that because you're a non-profit, you ask that we cover our own travel costs - for an event which, as you clearly stated, you only expect to benefit you (as a source of cheap laughs). We're also a non-profit. In fact, we have precisely no sources of income. So, Bob, I'd like to propose a counter-offer: you pay for my travel costs (after all, it's your event, and you do charge for admission to most events by the looks of it), and I'll bring you a couple beers from our local brewery.

Thirdly: you repeatedly said that you would want to vet potential "candidates" on their scientific literacy. You have made no attempt at making a similar offer back, and judging by what you've described so far, your understanding of the Flat Earth Theory is rather poor. Once again, you make it clear that you're interested in a very one-sided joke, and not a discussion.

These attitudes, as I've said many times before, greatly contribute to our growth. So, by all means, please continue to act like this in public. It draws great amounts of attention to us and really helps us develop a movement that now spans the plane. However, as far as your "event" goes, I'd like to recommend following common sense and being sincere with your colleagues. You don't have what it takes to respectfully recruit someone who disagrees with you. If they want to get serious about this, they need to find someone more qualified than yourself. Perhaps someone with his head not stuck so firmly in the stars, and one who can actually put aside differences for a moment.

Alternatively, you can go the "welp, I've tried, these lunatics couldn't be convinced by my perfectly rational offer" route, and skip straight to that local brewery of yours.

[3DGeek]

If I go over there you will just get schooled more badly than you do here. At least here you have the chance to google up some ancient hypothesis and insist that it is fact.

Wow!  I'd like to see that debate.   Heck, even I (as a non-astronomer) can dance rings around your arguments...I'd love to see a professional do it.

You're currently resorting to blanket "Show me the data" arguments because you can't deny 90% of the disproofs I've posted...and when we DO show you the data (eg PVoutput.org, airline flight data, the mathematics behind how the ephemeris is calculated) you have to resort to very vague and ineffectual complaints about it to avoid facing the undoubted truth.

[retiredAstrophysicist]

Thirdly: you repeatedly said that you would want to vet potential "candidates" on their scientific literacy. You have made no attempt at making a similar offer back, and judging by what you've described so far, your understanding of the Flat Earth Theory is rather poor. Once again, you make it clear that you're interested in a very one-sided joke, and not a discussion.

Thanks for this, Pete. I agree with you, that the vetting that takes place prior to the discussion should be two-sided. I have indeed been looking for more of a "Theory" on the Flat-Earth side, and haven't found your wiki of much help, unfortunately.

Perhaps you could start me off by showing me how the occultations of the bright star Aldebaran (Alpha Tau) during 2017 (9 Jan, observed from Asia; 5 Feb, from north Africa and southern Europe; 5 Mar, from USA, Mexico, and Central America; 1 Apr, observed from Japan and Korea; 28 Apr, Europe; 19 Jul, southwest Asia; etc.) are explained to have occurred and been visible only from the locations indicated. Because Aldebaran has a magnitude of 1.35, these occultations are visible even with good binoculars. Such observations, done with modest telescopes, have helped us to pin down the sizes of this and other stars that are regularly occulted by the moon. Once you've explained the 2017 occultations, you might go farther and predict those that will occur in 2018. Then we can make a head-to-head comparison of your predictions and ours. (Don't cheat, and don't waffle; be precise and take all the time you need, but let me know that you're working on it.)

If you doubt that these occultations occur and are observed, you can simply type "occultation Aldebaran" into Google Scholar and get some 2000 results spanning hundreds of years. A recent one, from the Devasthal Observatory in India, is abstracted at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1384107617302610 with the full article to come out next February. You can find lots more, of course.

Thanks for your help.

[douglips]

Look at you getting all optimistic with your occultation talk.

I can't even get them to tell me if they think latitude is a thing.

Oh but hey, if you're aware of actual observations of things like sunrise/sunset times we could use that. The closest we've found is there's about a million solar panel installations around the world hooked up to the internet but if you've got some gray haired astronomer in a tower somewhere observing when the sun actually appears, and writing it down in an old-timey notebook I'm sure that would finally convince them to believe timeanddate.com.

[Tom Bishop]

Perhaps you could start me off by showing me how the occultations of the bright star Aldebaran (Alpha Tau) during 2017 (9 Jan, observed from Asia; 5 Feb, from north Africa and southern Europe; 5 Mar, from USA, Mexico, and Central America; 1 Apr, observed from Japan and Korea; 28 Apr, Europe; 19 Jul, southwest Asia; etc.) are explained to have occurred and been visible only from the locations indicated.

Surely you have a better question than this. Because the stars and the moon are relatively near the same altitude in the Flat Earth model, it is possible for an occultation of a star by the moon to line up for only a narrow location beneath the moon, and not for all observers.

Because Aldebaran has a magnitude of 1.35, these occultations are visible even with good binoculars. Such observations, done with modest telescopes, have helped us to pin down the sizes of this and other stars that are regularly occulted by the moon. Once you've explained the 2017 occultations, you might go farther and predict those that will occur in 2018. Then we can make a head-to-head comparison of your predictions and ours. (Don't cheat, and don't waffle; be precise and take all the time you need, but let me know that you're working on it.)

Pete can simply explain that because the occultations have occurred before, at such and such time, in a pattern over the years, that it will happen again on the same pattern. You know, using the same technique that astronomers use to predict its occurrence.

If I were Pete I would next challenge you to show that astronomers have predicted the occultation of this star geometrically, which would involve solving the general three body problem (earth-moon-star in this case), a rather embarrassing geometrical problem which has been unsolved in classical physics for the last 500 years. Except for in some some very specific (and ridiculous imo) setups, a general three body problem has never been solved.

See: Three Body Problem on Wikipedia

[Rama Set]

Tom, why should hard-working people of intelligence be embarrassed by a difficult problem?  You can’t even be assed to recreate your observation across the bay with any sort of rigor, if anyone should feel embarrassed, and I don’t think anyone should, it’s you.

Edit: I also agree with what Pete said.

[StinkyOne]

Perhaps you could start me off by showing me how the occultations of the bright star Aldebaran (Alpha Tau) during 2017 (9 Jan, observed from Asia; 5 Feb, from north Africa and southern Europe; 5 Mar, from USA, Mexico, and Central America; 1 Apr, observed from Japan and Korea; 28 Apr, Europe; 19 Jul, southwest Asia; etc.) are explained to have occurred and been visible only from the locations indicated.

Surely you have a better question than this. Because the stars and the moon are relatively near the same altitude in the Flat Earth model, it is possible for an occultation of a star by the moon to line up for only a narrow location beneath the moon, and not for all observers.

Because Aldebaran has a magnitude of 1.35, these occultations are visible even with good binoculars. Such observations, done with modest telescopes, have helped us to pin down the sizes of this and other stars that are regularly occulted by the moon. Once you've explained the 2017 occultations, you might go farther and predict those that will occur in 2018. Then we can make a head-to-head comparison of your predictions and ours. (Don't cheat, and don't waffle; be precise and take all the time you need, but let me know that you're working on it.)

Pete can simply explain that because the occultations have occurred before, at such and such time, in a pattern over the years, that it will happen again on the same pattern. You know, using the same technique that astronomers use to predict its occurrence.

If I were Pete I would next challenge you to show that astronomers have predicted the occultation of this star geometrically, which would involve solving the general three body problem (earth-moon-star in this case), a rather embarrassing geometrical problem which has been unsolved in classical physics for the last 500 years. Except for in some some very specific (and ridiculous imo) setups, a general three body problem has never been solved.

See: Three Body Problem on Wikipedia

Is that your new lighthouse on Plymouth beach?? lol - the three body problem doesn't point to a flat Earth, nor does orbital patterns of celestial objects.

[Tom Bishop]

Tom, why should hard-working people of intelligence be embarrassed by a difficult problem?

The location of three moving bodies cannot be predicted. It is quite a stain on classical physics, and is absolutely embarrassing to physicists.

[Rama Set]

Tom, why should hard-working people of intelligence be embarrassed by a difficult problem?

The location of three moving bodies cannot be predicted. It is quite a stain on classical physics, and is absolutely embarrassing to physicists.

It is strange to answer a question by reiterating what prompted the question in the first place. What exactly should embarrass them about solving a currently unsolvable mathematical problem? 

[garygreen]

a general three body problem has never been solved.

See: Three Body Problem on Wikipedia

it's only accurate to say that no analytic solution has been found.  it's still more accurate to say that no useful analytic solutions have been found.

numerical solutions are most definitely available and are used regularly.

http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2013/Brown_Harrison/Code/Brown_H.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.02312.pdf

[StinkyOne]

Tom, why should hard-working people of intelligence be embarrassed by a difficult problem?

The location of three moving bodies cannot be predicted. It is quite a stain on classical physics, and is absolutely embarrassing to physicists.

Why do you continue to attempt to derail threads? If you feel the n-body issue should be discussed, create a thread. This thread is about a public discussion of FET.

[Tom Bishop]

Tom, why should hard-working people of intelligence be embarrassed by a difficult problem?

The location of three moving bodies cannot be predicted. It is quite a stain on classical physics, and is absolutely embarrassing to physicists.

It is strange to answer a question by reiterating what prompted the question in the first place. What exactly should embarrass them about solving a currently unsolvable mathematical problem? 

They should be embarrassed because it is seemingly a simple problem on its face, but they don't have the tools to do it.

a general three body problem has never been solved.

See: Three Body Problem on Wikipedia

it's only accurate to say that no analytic solution has been found.  it's still more accurate to say that no useful analytic solutions have been found.

numerical solutions are most definitely available and are used regularly.

http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2013/Brown_Harrison/Code/Brown_H.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.02312.pdf

Read through the first PDF. They are running a simulation of three bodies, tracing the patterns of its movement, and then making a prediction on the pattern they saw. This is not a real solution to the Three Body Problem.

Pete and the OP in this thread can both predict the occultation of the star based on patterns which have been seen before. This is not a geometric (or analytical, if you prefer) solution to the Three Body Problem and does not actually predict using the physics of the model.

[garygreen]

They should be embarrassed because it is seemingly a simple problem on its face, but they don't have the tools to do it.

why do you believe that this is a simple problem?

Read through the first PDF. They are running a simulation of three bodies, tracing the patterns of its movement, and then making a prediction on the pattern they saw. This is not a real solution to the Three Body Problem.

can you point me to the passage you're referring to?  i'm not seeing anything about pattern recognition.

numerical integration is not a process of finding patterns.  it's literally just using a computer to solve equations of motion derived from newton's laws.  it's not pattern reognition; it's geometry + calculus + computers.

[Tom Bishop]

can you point me to the passage you're referring to?  i'm not seeing anything about pattern recognition.

The whole paper is about creating a simple 3D model of rotating bodies and then concluding that because a simulation can be made of moving bodies, that the n-body problem has been solved.

Read page 5 of 8. It describes the creation of a computer simulation of 3 bodies. They run the simulation for several rotations and then provide an image which illustrates the path of how the the bodies moved. A sample earth-moon-sun system was run for several "years" and the path of those bodies where they repeated their paths is shown in that diagram. They conclude that because they were able to create a computer simulation that the 3-body problem has been solved. The page is concluded with "Therefore, it is possible to use the n-Body equations and a selection of the system’s physical properties to create a model of the Sun, Earth, Luna system."

At no point do they actually come up with a solution to the three body problem. They think that they can create a 3D model of moving bodies, run it a few times, see the pattern, and therefore they can predict future occurrences from the pattern and the three body problem has been solved.

This is like saying that you solved the 3 body problem because you went online to one of those comet gravity simulators and tossed some balls around to rotate around each other, traced out where they were moving, and that you therefore solved the 3 body problem. It is not a solution. You found a pattern in your gravity simulator. It is not useful for solving problems.