Hiya…

I’m new to TFES and confess to being a Flat Earth sceptic.

I was interested in Tom Bishop’s experiment done across Monterey Bay, which clearly lacks the scientific rigour to be called a proof.

Why for example is he talking about the ‘drop’ due to curvature, and using a right-angle triangle (and Pythagoras) from the position of the observer? Surely the salient point is how big is the bulge due to curvature, and the maximum bulge would be halfway between the two points?

So using Pythagoras on 11.5 miles instead of 23 miles, you get…

37632 – 11.52 = 14160036.75

Sqrt of 14160036.75 = 3762.9824275

3763 – 3762.9824275 = 0.0175725

0.0175725 x 5280 = 92.78 feet

That’s a long way from “Hence after 23 miles the earth drops approximately 352 feet”. Am I missing something?

Furthermore, we don’t have any evidence that he was 20” above sea level, nor of height of the people and objects he was viewing 23 miles away. And that they were indeed 23 miles away. Also, he doesn’t factor in atmospheric refraction which over these distances would be significant.

I read elsewhere that he was using a 500x telescope. It must be quite a beast... I have a Skywatcher 6” Newtonian for astronomy, and I couldn’t get close to 500x!

So I remain a sceptic!